By Deborah Ashin, Special to JTNews
It rivals Hollywood’s most fantastic archaeological adventures, featuring layers of buried ancient cities that contain mysteries and treasures from the past. Tel Dor, perched above the coastline about 30 miles from Tel Aviv, is one of the largest and most intriguing archaeological excavations in Israel. And thanks to an assistant professor of classics at the University of Washington, it now has a direct connection to Seattle.
Dr. Sarah Culpepper Stroup, who joined UW’s classics faculty in 2001, recently was invited to co-direct the Tel Dor Excavation Consortium with UC Berkeley as part of an international group of scholars. The 35-year-old professor, who has undergraduate degrees in classics and philosophy from UW, was introduced to Tel Dor while working on her Ph.D. in classics at the University of California at Berkeley.
“Dor is a marvelous, exciting, mysterious, romantic site,” she says. “ I’m uncovering things no one has seen for 2,500 years and walking down into areas where no one has set foot for 3,000 years! What I love about Dor is that it offers an entirely different view of Israel — a view of history, the people, the land, the life.”
One of the few natural harbors on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, Dor was an important multi-cultural crossroads, attracting both commerce and conquerors for more than 1,800 years. Its history reads like a textbook timeline: originally ruled by a group of “sea people,” Dor was inhabited by Canaanites, settled by Phoenicians, and around 970 BCE served as King Solomon’s main port. Later, it was ruled by Assyrians, Persians, and then by Alexander the Great. The site boasted a fortress, a Jewish community (first century CE) and even a Crusader castle.
According to Stroup, Tel Dor is an “unbelievably important example of intercultural commerce and interactions.”
She adds, “One of the things that makes Dor so fascinating is that we don’t see a sharp shift of cultural occupation. Although the political scene changed, Dor remained a cosmopolitan city because of traders and travelers.”
Tel Dor’s surface area is about 21 acres or just over five city blocks. Because it is not a natural geological formation, but made up of occupation layers, archaeologists can dig down until they hit virgin earth anywhere in the Tel. The deepest pits at Tel Dor are about 50 feet, which Stroup says can be a bit scary to work in. “They’re held up by walls that haven’t been uncovered for several thousand years. There’s danger because as they dry out, the walls can crack and shift,” she says.
Although the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem conducted the first excavations at Dor in 1923, no intensive excavations were launched until 1980 when the Hebrew University of Jerusalem took over. The university continues to oversee the site. To date, only about five percent of Tel Dor has been excavated, which means incredible things are waiting to be discovered.
Over the past 20 years, excavations at Tel Dor have revealed amazing finds, including a huge stone gate of Solomon’s city, cylinder seals from Assyrian times, terra cotta figurines from the Persian occupation, well-preserved stone-walled houses from the Hellenistic period and mosaic floors dating to Roman times.
Recently, the UC Berkeley team found a large Roman period temple, a portico complex, private homes and a Hellenistic mosaic that Stroup says rivals anything from Pompeii or Herculaneum.
Stroup remembers an especially exciting moment. “As we were taking down a rubble wall, we found the other most exciting find of the season — the Nike statue. She’s only about half life-size and has lost her head, but she is the first piece of monumental statuary found at Dor,” Stroup recalls.
Although Stroup hopes to return to Tel Dor this summer, she says she won’t be bringing any students or volunteers, who are the backbone of any expedition. The unstable situation in the Middle East has made it too risky for them to make the trip. However, Stroup will be seeking interested volunteers for a teaching expedition in 2004.
“Volunteers don’t need a background in archaeology or specific skills — just the willingness to work hard, enthusiasm and a willingness to live in basic accommodations,” she says.
Typically, the group rises at 3:30 a.m. and takes a 20 minute bus ride from their dormitory to the Tel. Work starts at 4:30 a.m., just as the sun rises, and continues until 1:00 p.m., when it gets too hot to continue. They devote afternoons to cleaning pottery, dating objects, and discussing aspects of the excavation.
Stroup describes the day-to-day work at Tel Dor as being musical. “You hear the waves, the picks going and the buckets being passed. It’s quiet and peaceful,” she says.
All the sites have their unpredictable moments, however. One day, a group of graduate students who had been hauling bucket after bucket of dirt from a 40-foot pit pierced the quiet by rigging up speakers and playing the Indiana Jones theme song. “After about the third time, it was enough,” she says.
Stroup herself fits the Hollywood image of the elegant blonde swashbuckler who periodically escapes teaching Latin classes to embark upon exciting archaeological digs. She describes her work at Tel Dor as being “one part creative intellectual investigation, one part hard core science, one part mystery novel, one part dirt and sweat — and one part Indiana Jones.”
For more information about volunteer opportunities at Tel Dor, please contact Professor Stroup at [email protected]