An Iron Age I Canaanite/Phoenician Courtyard house at Tel Dor: A comparative architectural and functional analysis

In this paper, we present an analysis of an Iron Age I dwelling at the Phoenician site of Dor, on Israel's Carmel coast. We provide a definition for the architectural mental template for this type of house-a Central Courtyard Hash-Plan House. By combining an analysis of the size and layout of the house, and the distribution of artifacts and ecofacts in it, we define rooms devoted to specialized economic activities such as food production and storage and also attempt to identify gendered spaces. We conclude that the house was a self-contained agrarian unit engaged in complex economic activity. The same conceptual plan, housing similar economic activities, can be identified in other dwellings in the southern Levant, from Late Bronze Age I to Late Iron Age IIA. The gradual disappearance of this house type, vis-à-vis the emergence, on the one hand, of smaller and simpler dwellings such as the ubiquitous Four-Room House and, on the other, that of public facilities for specialized economic tasks, signifies to our minds a fundamental ideological and economic transformation, a change in the habitus of Levantine society-namely, the gradual segregation between households and various aspects of economic life.