Description : Tel Qiri (Hebrew: תל קירי) is a tel and an ancient village site located inside the modern kibbutz of HaZore'a in northern Israel. It lies on the eastern slopes of the Menashe Heights and the western edge of the Jezreel Valley. As of the beginning of the excavations in 1975, almost half of the site was still visible, but today the entire site is covered by the houses of HaZore'a. The site spans an area of one hectare and is believed to have been a dependency of the nearby Tel Yokneam. The site hosted some human activity during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, as well as parts of the Bronze Age. An uninterrupted sequence of settlement lasted from the Iron Age to the Roman-Byzantine period. Unlike all urban centers in northern Israel, the village in Tel Qiri, which flourished during the Iron Age, escaped all military events and no traces of destruction can be found there. This minor, damaged and seemingly insignificant site yielded an amazingly rich and diverse quantity of remains of different periods. The excavation of Tel Qiri is part of the Yoqneam Regional Project, which conducted excavations at nearby Tel Yokneam and Tel Qashish. Archaeologists have unearthed eleven strata of settlement. The deepest, eleventh layer contains remains of an agricultural settlement from the Neolithic period (c. 10,000 – 4500 BCE) and potsherds from the Ghassulian culture (c. 4400 – 3500 BCE) and first half of the Early Bronze Age (c. 3000 – 2200 BCE). The village was re-established during the Middle Bronze Age, c. 1750 – 1650 BCE, and ceased to exist in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550 – 1200 BCE). An era of uninterrupted settlement begins at the start of the Iron Age (c. 1200 – 539 BCE) and continues through the Achaemenid (539–330 BCE), Hellenistic (330–63 BCE), and up until the Roman Empire and Byzantine periods (63 BCE – 634 CE).
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