Tel Miqne - Ekron
Trude Dothan

The excavations of Ekron, Ashdod and Ashkelon, three of the Philistine Pentapolis, were built on the ruins of much smaller Canaanite cities. These flourishing urban centres, whose sub?stratum was rooted in the Aegean traditions. The three cities reveal similar evidence of an impressive urban momentum, in which new cities vigorously expanded beyond the confines of the smaller Canaanite cities. They provide evidence of sophisticated town planning, extensive ceramic production and a distinctive ceramic repertoire, metallurgy and glyptics, architectural features such as the adaptation of the megaron plan and the hearth in different configurations such as cultic and domestic, and cult practices which, when taken together, formthe Philistine / Sea Peoples culture.

Tel Miqne - Ekron is the type site of the Philistine city because of the well-preserved nature of the site, and because it provides a comprehensive picture of the changes in the life of the city, its expansions and contractions at different periods of its history.

The first Iron Age I city, founded in the first half of the twelfth century, encompassed the entire area of the tel - about fifty acres, through the development of the city at it's economic floruit to its destruction around 1000 B.C.E. - which ends of the first phase of Philistine settlement.

The excavations of Ekron have produced evidence which enables us to distinguish the internal development of the culture in Philistia proper, to compare this development with that of the settlements outside Philistia, and on this basis to establish a reliable relative chronology. The excavations at Ekron have strengthened my view that the transition from the Late Bronze Age to Iron Age I in Canaan was a complex process in which diverse cultures overlapped for certain periods, and that these cultural changes should not be seen as applying simultaneously to all sites.