The site at Beit Dagan extends across a flat hill, slightly north of the Jaffa-Jerusalem highway, c. 0.5 kilometers south of the tell of ancient Beit Dagan. During the course of the excavation two different cemeteries were revealed. On the western part of the hill a Muslim cemetery from the Mamluk period was uncovered, and on the hilltop and the eastern part of the hill a cemetery dating to the Intermediate Bronze Age was exposed. No finds or objects were recovered in the Muslim cemetery and the dating of the tombs there is based on the Mamluk period pottery sherds that were found in the mudbricks covering the tombs.
Some 135 tombs were excavated in the Intermediate Bronze Age cemetery. Although most of the shafts that accessed the tombs were destroyed, a number of them were preserved in their entirety. It was possible to reconstruct the dimensions of the shafts and the tombs from those shafts that had still survived. The shafts were 2 m or more in depth and the dimensions of the burial chambers ranged from 1.20m (the smallest) to 1.60 m (the largest). The tombs were dug into extremely hard sandy hamra and based on their shape they are identical to the tombs that were hewn in the limestone bedrock at Jericho, Dahar Marzavneh etc.
The finds in the tombs consist mostly of pottery vessels, a few bronze weapons, and a small number of beads. The bronze weapons are identical to the weaponry of the period that was found in other sites in the country. The pottery vessels that were discovered in the tombs differ in many of their details from pottery vessels that were found in other regions. They are different than the vessels that were found in the northern coastal plain. Several types are similar to those of the Samarian Hills and some are similar to the types from the Judean Shephelah. It can therefore be said that there was a unique pottery group that was widely distributed in the Yarkon and Ayalon river basins and that it is different than the groups of pottery vessels known to us from other regions in the Land of Israel.
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