Tell Dothan is located in the northern Samaria Hills on the eastern side of the Dothan Valley, some 22 km north of Shechem and 10 km south of Jenin.(fig.1) Rising approximately 60 m above the surrounding valley, Dothan is a prominent mound that is composed of nearly 15 m of stratified remains on top of a natural hill of some 45 m high. The site has a fairly flat top with steeply sloping sides. The summit comprises approximately 10 acres and the occupied area of the slopes includes another 15 acres. Its area of occupation, therefore, consists of approximately 25 acres. The eastern and southern slopes are terraced today with olive groves that are watered from a spring on the south side of the tell. That water source likely served the site in antiquity.
The rock formations that are exposed in the immediate environs of Tell Dothan are Eocene beds of limestone, chalky limestone and soft chalk. The settlement was founded on a gently sloping ridge which consists of a thin cap of chalky limestone over the chalky subsurface. Though the upper unit is basically a chalky limestone, a few exposures approach the classification of micritic limestone. Fresh exposures of the chalk are white, turning to gray with exposure to natural elements. Most of the chalk is homogeneous; iron stains are common, likely from pyrite inclusions. The site offered the ancients a suitable location for the digging of cisterns and tombs. The building material that was utilized in the settlement's architecture was quarried nearby.
Tell Dothan has been identified with the biblical city of the same name, mentioned in Genesis 37 as the place where Joseph found his brothers during their wanderings with their father's flocks. According to the narrative, Joseph was sent by his father Jacob from the Valley of Hebron to find his brothers in the region of Shechem but learned that they were tending the flocks in the area of Dothan. Thereafter, the narrative describes the intrigue that led to Joseph's being taken to Egypt by a caravan of Ishmaelites (or Midianites) who were traveling to Egypt via Dothan from Gilead.
During the period of the monarchy, Dothan is described as a well-fortified city to which the Aramean king sent emissaries in search of the prophet Elisha (2 Kgs 6:13-14). It was in this context that Elisha's servant was encouraged by a vision of heavenly forces arrayed on a hill to the east of town. Other literary references include three notations in the Book of Judith (3:9; 4:6 and 7:3) and one in the Onomasticon of Eusebius (76:13).
Dothan is surrounded on the north, east and south by hills that enclose the fertile Dothan Valley (fig. 1, fig. 2 ).1 The site dominates this plain which has always been of strategic importance as the eastern-most of the three main passes between the Sharon Plain and the Jezreel Valley through the mountainous ridge created by the northern Ephraimite hill country and the Carmel range. The main pass followed the Wadi 'Ara (Nahal 'Iron) and had the advantage of being the shortest route between the coast and the Jezreel Valley despite the strategic disadvantages of the narrow defiles. The other passes were somewhat easier but longer. The southernmost of these alternative routes negotiated the mountainous spine via the Dothan Valley, reaching the Jezreel Valley south of Ta'anach. The Ishmaelite/Midianite caravan of Gen 37:25 probably traveled this route on its way from Gilead to Egypt.
Dothan was excavated by Joseph Free in nine seasons between 1953 and 1964 (fig. 3).2 The expedition was not in the field during the years of 1957, 1961, or 1963. According to the excavator, the site yielded a nearly continuous occupational sequence in 21 levels, dating from the end of the Chalcolithic period through the Byzantine period with later occupation as late as the 14th century C.E. Free's excavations have never been published in technical detail and even the preliminary reports provide few details on the site's rich architectural traditions and artifact assemblages (Free 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956a, 1956b, 1958a, 1959, 1960a, 1962; [see Supplemental Readings for Free's popular writings] also Ussishkin 1975).3 Preliminary reports were prepared for the eighth (1962) and ninth (1964) seasons but they were never published.
The 1953-64 excavations represented the first of two phases in the Dothan Archaeological Project. The second phase of the project is a long-range undertaking which seeks to publish a multi-volume final report on the nine-year campaign. The first volume will publish the western cemetery (Tombs 1, 2 and 3), excavated during the sixth to the ninth seasons. Subsequent publications will focus on the tell excavations with emphasis on selected studies such as the city's various fortification systems, the Iron Age city and the ruins of the acropolis area. The current article will introduce the largely unpublished tombs of the western cemetery, focusing on Tomb 1, with brief comment on the tell excavations.4
Dothan was investigated in six major areas of excavation (T, B, A, D, L and K, moving from east to west). The western cemetery, which is the primary focus of this article, is located in area K on the western end of the tell.
Area T is located on the eastern extremity of the tell's summit. It encompassed the highest part of the mound and that designated by Free as the "acropolis" area (Free 1956a: 16-17; 1959: 26). Published data for Area B, just to the west of Area T and north of Area A, are exceptionally meager and consist only of a few observations related to remains of the Roman and Hellenistic periods. The excavation records and Free's unpublished ninth season report provide a few more details regarding occupation during the Roman, Byzantine and Medieval Arab periods. The central section of the top of the mound (Area A) was occupied by a Hellenistic settlement, dating to the third and second centuries B.C.E., beneath which was a substantial Iron Age settlement (Free 1954: 15-16; 1955: 3-7; 1956: 11, 14-15 fig. 2). The excavator's unpublished ninth season report provides some details regarding a Middle Bronze Age "citadel" that was partially excavated during the eighth and ninth seasons. Area D, on the south side of the summit of the tell yielded remains that dated between the beginning of the Early Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron II period (Free1953: 16-18; 1956b: 45-46). Subsequent work extended the later range to include the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
The largest of the areas of excavation was Area L, on the western summit of the mound, contiguous with the eastern side of Area K and the western cemetery. The slope section of this area yielded substantial fortifications of the Early Bronze Age and, although few published details are available, the area also produced sections of the city's Middle and Late Bronze Age defenses (Free 1958: 10-12). Further east in Area L, large sections of an Iron Age administrative building were uncovered (Free 1959: 22-24 1960: 7-9).
Footnote 1 - All plans and photographs in this publication were used with permission from The Dothan Archaeological Project under the direction of Robert Cooley. The pottery drawings were done by Abbas Alizadeh.
Footnote 2 - Joseph Free (1911-1974) was Professor of Biblical Archaeology at Wheaton College during the nine seasons of excavation between 1953 and 1964. In 1965, he retired to northern Minnesota in order to pursue his publication projects. Soon thereafter, however, he accepted the position of Professor of Archaeology at Bemidji State College in Bemidji, Minnesota where he served until the time of his death. He was truly a pioneer in the modern era of Holy Land travel. Between 1935 and 1965 he introduced many hundreds to the sites of Syria-Palestine and to the archaeological record of the ancient Near East. He was among the first of the archaeologists to build an excavation team based, in large measure, on volunteer help. His influence was significant on the professional development of numerous colleagues, resulting in the formation of The Near East Archaeological Society.
Footnote 3 - The excavated materials from Dothan are presently housed in several locations: a small collection in the Jordan Archaeological Museum in Amman; several collections totalling over 2000 pieces are located in Jerusalem at the Rockefeller Museum, Saint George's College and in the Siriganian Building; a large collection of artifacts and some of the field records are stored at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois; and finally, most of the field records and a representative collection of artifacts are located at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. The latter collection was originally housed at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri and was transferred to the seminary in July 1981.
Footnote 4 - A project of this magnitude has generated a lengthy list of acknowledgements of which only a few will be noted here. Gratitude is expressed to Joseph Cunningham, Bonnie Hanson and Carl Taeschner for their generous financial support and to Anita Free Wilhelmi, David Free and Abed Ismail for their dedicated support of the Dothan Archaeological Project. A special word of thanks is expressed to Alfred Hoerth for years of work with the Wheaton College collection of Tell Dothan artifacts and for his facilitation of our research efforts with this corpus.
