ABSTRACT
In the early twentieth century Duncan Mackenzie-followed by John Garstang and William Phythian-Adams-first attempted to understand the Late Bronze (LB) and Iron Ages at Ashkelon using sections scraped along the western and northern scarp of the mound (al-Hadra), in the center of Ashkelon. From these sections, Mackenzie and Phythian-Adams argued that the Late Bronze Age city had been destroyed in a massive conflagration and was succeeded by a Philistine city in the early Iron Age (Mackenzie 1913: 21-23, Plate II; Phythian-Adams 1923: 60-63, Fig. 3). It was left to the Leon Levy Expedition to confirm these observations by opening substantial areas adjacent to the sections cut by the teams from the Palestine Exploration Fund. Since the Iron Age strata lay below significant later buildup, it took more than a decade of intensive excavation to reach the Iron I remains with any breadth. A step trench excavated from 1985 to 1990 yielded tantalizing clues about the earliest Philistine settlement in the twelfth century (Stager 1991), but the evidence was, as in the case of Mackenzie and Phythian-Adams, quite limited in its scope. The first broad excavation area to reach Iron Age I remains was immediately next to the seapart of Grid 50 according to the site-wide grid of the Leon Levy expedition (Fig. 20.1)—immediately adjacent to the area where Mackenzie first described a Late Bronze Age destruction in a
scraping of the sea-side scarp. After fourteen seasons of modern excavation, the expedition discovered a single Iron I stratum from the eleventh century (equivalent to Miqne V, Tell Qasile XI), and below this, without a destruction, a stratum of the thirteenth century. While Mackenzie and Phythian-Adams presented a Late Bronze Age destruction as one of their chief conclusions (Mackenzie 1913: Plate I; Phythian-Adams 1923: Figs. 3-4), recent excavations have not found any evidence of a suitable destruction in any excavation area or probe in the vicinity.
