Abstract The discovery of exceptionally well-preserved iron blooms during underwater excavations at the Dor Lagoon provides a rare and transformative window into southern Levantine Iron Age metallurgy and trade following the collapse of Late Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean. For the first time, unworked iron blooms, still encased in protective slag, have been recovered, representing the earliest securely dated form of industrial iron products in the archaeological record, to date. Radiocarbon modeling of an embedded charred oak twig, together with additional short-lived carbon samples, dates the blooms to the late 7th to early 6th centuries BCE.These findings challenge long-standing assumptions that iron blooms were typically forged into billets or bars immediately after smelting, and question suggestions that iron smelting took place within southern Levantine urban centers. Instead, the Dor blooms demonstrate that raw iron was transported in its as-smelted state across the Mediterranean, with adhering slag layers protecting the metal from corrosion during shipment. This pattern suggests that Iron Age urban centers concentrated on smithing rather than smelting activities. The finds further indicate that raw iron was circulating as a traded commodity, possibly under Egyptian rule following the Neo-Assyrian withdrawal from the region, opening new commercial networks, particularly with the Aegean.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.