This season was the eleventh at Dor. Directed by Professor Andrew Stewart (History of Art), assisted by Dr. Allen Estes (NES), the team totaled fourteen staff and 50 volunteers, including six students on scholarships generously funded by the College of Letters and Science; the six-week campaign lasted through July and early August.

In Area F3, a unit supervised by Dora Nicopoulos continued excavation in the oil press under the Roman temple (the great northern foundation). The weight-pits were fully excavated, and a large quantity of organic material, sherds, and two coins were recovered. The organic material included animal and fish bones, barley, at least two varieties of olive, and numerous other seeds, as yet unidentified. The pottery all seems to belong to the mid first century B.C.E., and included a Rhodian stamped amphora handle which should help us to get a closer fix on the date of the deposit; likewise the two coins. In any case, they are now sure that the facility was constructed ca. 200 B.C.E. and went out of use ca. 50 B.C.E.; domestic structures were then erected on the site in the Augustan period; and finally the temple was built over all of these in the later 2nd century C.E. So either their putative predecessor to the temple stood to the south and has now been eroded away, or they have just possibly been looking at it all along: for three niches in the eastern wall of the olive press suggest the presence of votive statues within the press itself, as at Maresha.

Area G, the Iron-Age area in the center of the tel which we excavated from 1986-95, was dug this year by a group of German volunteers supervised by three ex-Berkeley staff members now working with the Hebrew University team: Dr. Jeffrey Zorn (now Adjunct Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell), Cameron Monroe (UCLA), and Margaret Strubel. They found more evidence of the early Iron I destruction's ("Doreen's"-see further below-and the earlier, burned, Bakery Destruction), including a beer-jug identified by Dr. Stern as Sikil.

Their operations in Area H, above the smaller, southern Roman foundation, were led by Allen Estes (NES) and John Yelding-Sloan, and concentrated upon extending the excavated area to the north, east, and west. They linked up with old Area F1 to the north, finding the extension of the Roman main N-S highway (the "Embarcadero") and associated buildings. Floor deposits from the rooms gave a 1st-2nd century C.E. date for their occupation. These rooms were covered by the terracing, road, and drain system that accompanied the construction of the temples in the late 2nd century C.E. This, in turn, was buried when the site was abandoned around 230 C.E., and partially robbed out by the Crusaders when they came to construct their moat and accompanying glacis in the 13th century. Their robber trenches yielded many small finds, including Crusader pottery, horse-trappings and shoes, and horse-bones. On the western, seaward side we removed the Dolphin mosaic that gave their rich house its nickname of "Villa Delphinia"; it will shortly go on display in their museum in Kibbutz Nachsholim, the "Glasshouse." They then continued excavation in rooms that had not been completely cleared last year, and outside the house's retaining wall. Here they were surprised to find two basements, one with door and steps intact, and numerous fragments of a superb garden fresco that finds its best parallels in Julio-Claudian Italy, at Primaporta and Pompeii. Their theory that the house rests on the old Hellenistic city wall was somewhat strengthened by the discovery of more bossed Hasmonean-style masonry in its lower courses. Since they have yet to reach the bottom of this deposit, they look forward to finding more of both fresco and wall in future seasons.

In addition, their site architect, John Berg, completed the survey of the foundations of the two temples, and he and Andrew Stewart began work on a preliminary publication. While they were digging, they were also delighted to receive two strong endorsements of their hypothesis that it was an earthquake that destroyed the early Iron-age walls in Area G that killed "Doreen" in the late eleventh century B.C.E. (see Andrew Stewart, "A Death at Dor," Biblical Archaeology Review, 1993). Their allies are Dr. Patricia Smith, physical anthropologist at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, and the distinguished Stanford seismologist and geo-historian, Professor Amos Nur: see his article, "Earthquake! Inspiration for Armageddon?" in Biblical Archaeology Review 23. 4 (1997) 49-55. And content with all this, they then went home!

Last modified 10 November 1999.