Shipwreck evidence for Iron Age II smithing and smelting

MARINE ARCHAEOLOGY: Iron from a 2,600-year-old shipwreck off Israeli coast may rewrite the history of war. The first evidence that iron was traded as a semifinished product has been found off the coast of nor (Rosella Tercatin, Times of Israel).

It was against the backdrop of this upheaval that a ship sank just meters from the ancient harbor of Dor, on the Carmel Coast in northern Israel (also known as Tantura Lagoon). Over two and a half millennia later, as maritime archaeologists retrieved some of its cargo, they made an unprecedented discovery, which changes the understanding of ancient metal production, trade routes, and possibly war supplies in the Iron Age (1200-586 BCE), a crucial time in the region’s history when most of the biblical narratives took place.

These "iron blooms" were found in the remains of Dor L2, one of the cargoes excavated at three shipwreck sites in Dor Lagoon. They have been in the news recently. See here.

The underlying open-access peer-review article in Heritage Science:

Article Open access Published: 13 March 2026

Earliest iron blooms discovered off the Carmel coast revise Mediterranean trade in raw metal ca. 600 BCE

Tzilla Eshel, Andrei Ioffe, Dafna Langgut, Yoav Bornstein, Zachary C. Dunseth, Marko Runjajić, Shmuel Ariely, Thomas E. Levy & Assaf Yasur-Landau
npj Heritage Science volume 14, Article number: 155 (2026)

Abstract

The discovery of exceptionally well-preserved iron blooms during underwater excavations in the Dor Lagoon provides a rare and transformative window into southern Levantine Iron Age metallurgy and trade. For the first time, unworked iron blooms, still encased in protective slag, have been recovered, representing the earliest securely dated industrial iron products identified to date. Radiocarbon modeling of an embedded charred oak twig, together with additional short-lived carbon samples, dates the blooms to the late 7th–early 6th centuries BCE. These findings challenge assumptions that iron blooms were typically forged immediately after smelting. Instead, the Dor blooms demonstrate that raw iron was transported in its as-smelted state, with adhering slag protecting the metal from corrosion during shipment. Results suggest that Iron Age urban centers focused on smithing rather than smelting activities, while raw iron circulated as a traded commodity, possibly under Saitic-Egyptian rule following the Neo-Assyrian withdrawal from the region.

Cross-file under Maritime (Underwater) Archaeology.

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