When Elizabeth Bloch-Smith reached the floor in a monumental seafront Phoenician building that was strangely bare of artifacts indicating the structure’s use — it wasn’t the end of a maddening story.
That’s what Bloch-Smith loves about Tel Dor and its collaboration with the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Weizmann Institute is a multidisciplinary research organization in Rehovot, Israel, noted for its wide-ranging scientific inquiry.
Tel Dor? It was a key port from the Iron Age to late Roman times, finally diminishing in importance about 250 CE — by which time the port of Caesarea Maritima just six miles south along the Mediterranean coast had probably taken over much of its shipping.
The collaboration between excavation and Weizmann enhances the importance of Tel Dor, dug since 1980 except for two seasons.
Tel Dor now is well enough understood that archaeologists turn to it seeking help — for example, to identify cargos of Phoenician shipwrecks as far away as Spain.
“Our particular importance is first the sea,” says Ilan Sharon, Tel Dor’s dig director. “We’re a port town. Number 2 is that we are a site that’s both biblical and classical.”
MOTLEY CREW
But now Tel Dor is much more as well. The Weizmann collaboration means that Sharon and his team work with physicists, chemists, biologists and geologists — as well as the usual biblical scholars and classicists studying Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Sharon has some fun with that. “Sometimes ironically it’s easier to work with physicists than to work with classicists,” quips the University of Haifa Iron Age specialist. “But we manage.”
The prospect of fruitful exchanges among this motley crew is what excites Sharon about his dig. A long-term project such as Tel Dor lends itself to cross-disciplinary study — if you keep it going. “You need 10 to 15 years to even learn your site,” explains Sharon, who has worked at Tel Dor since the beginning of the excavation. “Most projects at this point — they finish. We at this point decided that that’s where the real beginning is.”
Now Sharon is in a position to field research requests that will buttress the full field of archaeology. Say you want to test carbon-dating accuracy with samples from Late Iron, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods. Sharon can quickly show you exactly where to scrape up that organic material at Tel Dor.
The dig continued at Dor until 2000, the first year for biblical scholar Bloch-Smith. After a two-year hiatus, excavation resumed in 2003. In that year excavators began the collaboration with scientists from Weizmann. The payoff was prompt. Excavators were stumped by the empty monumental building in the Phoenician style overlooking the harbor at Dor, dating to between 1100 and 900 BCE.
The building was utterly bare of artifacts indicating its use. “We had no information in the forms that archaeologists normally collect,” says Bloch-Smith. Enter the Weizmann scientists. “Through their scientific analysis,” says Bloch-Smith, “they were able to give us new information.”
On the floor of the building, the Weizmann collaborators found microscopic fish bones. That still leaves Bloch-Smith without any idea of the building’s function — but it’s a vital clue.
Another example from the 2003 season: Weizmann scientists analyzed various levels from an unspectacular sequence of grey-white ash/plaster floors in a room at Tel Dor.
Only one level actually turned out to be plaster floor. A second was infused with stalks from one kind of grass. “It was probably a woven mat,” says Bloch-Smith, “which we would never have gotten archaeologically.”
A third floor turned out to be dung ash — likely from kitchen cooking. The uppermost ash/plaster floor was all unburned animal dung, suggesting the building may have been last used as a stable.
“So all these surfaces which to the eye looked similar and we would call ash/plaster,” says Bloch-Smith, “turned out to be completely different surfaces.”
POOP SNOOPING
The Weizmann collaborators can’t always help. Bloch-Smith asked a Weizmann biologist whether dung analysis could show what kind of animals were present. Sorry. Poop snooping hasn’t reached that level of sophistication.
Dor is mentioned in the Bible without playing a key role. Its king Ben-Abinadab married Taphath daughter of Solomon. As the southernmost Phoenician city, the town elsewhere in the Bible is a border marker. The construction style of the Iron Age site is Phoenician with Philistine elements — “clearly a cosmopolitan coastal culture,” says Bloch-Smith.
Excavators at the site work in a gorgeous seafront setting in full view of the beach at the resort where they stay.
If she and Sharon can keep their workers’ minds off sun and sea, Bloch-Smith will be coming down to a level which in an adjacent square showed massive sandstone surfaces over the entire area, many with significant sloping, and “an odd ashlar here and there,” she says.
“It’s one of these enigmatic subphases. So you start generating questions. You ask the Weizmann people to look at some of these surfaces.”
At least one sequence is clear: Bloch-Smith traces the success of the cross-disciplinary approach directly to Sharon. “He’s mathematical and scientific,” says Bloch-Smith. “He’s the one who’s making these overtures.”
Sharon himself anticipates a quiet season at Tel Dor. You know what that means. Stay tuned.
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