Tel Hreiz: a boulder wall at a submerged village

The explanations distinguish finds, interpretations and open questions. Sources appear at the end of the page.

What was described

An article published in 2019 in the journal PLOS ONE by Ehud Galili and colleagues describes Tel Hreiz, a submerged Neolithic settlement off the Carmel coast. In the water a linear stone feature was recorded whose sections together exceed 100 metres in length, built of boulders weighing 200-1,000 kg each. It lies 3 metres below mean sea level, about 90 metres offshore. According to the article it was exposed in 2012 and 2015, after winter storms. Source 1.

The date as reported

The article dates the settlement to 7500-7000 BP (before present) and writes that all the finds associated with the wall and the settlement are "consistently dated" to that range; in the text read, the range is not labelled calibrated or uncalibrated. The authors classify the settlement in the southern Levantine late Pottery Neolithic, Wadi Rabah culture, and estimate that it was occupied for 300-500 years. This page does not convert the range to BCE. It is placed on the site's Late Pottery Neolithic page because of the authors' classification; the numeric range on that page comes from another study and is not a conversion of the dates here. Source 1.

The authors' interpretation

The identification as a sea wall is the article's authors' interpretation: in their words the wall "served as a seawall, built to protect the village against Mediterranean Sea-level rise". They reject other readings, including a field boundary or terrace wall, a defensive wall or a territorial marker. By their account, Neolithic coastal populations would have experienced sea-level rise of 4-7 mm a year. They add that the wall may have worked for a period, but that ultimately the village was inundated and abandoned. Source 1.

"Oldest known": a claim and its limits

The abstract states that the seawall "is unique for the period and is the oldest known coastal defence worldwide", and the article's title presents it as demonstrating the "earliest known coastal defence". That is the authors' claim, and it holds only for what was known to them in 2019. The article itself notes that the place has never been systematically excavated, and that the finds come from underwater survey and salvage excavations, in work carried out from 1989 to 2017. Source 1.

Inside the village

Besides the wall, the article describes remains of a rectangular building of 3 by 4 metres, a small hearth next to the wall, round installations of field stones, and two human skeletons buried in the clay without grave structures. It reports that hundreds of waterlogged olive pits were recovered there, "suggesting oil extraction"; that subject is also discussed on this site in the article on Kfar Samir, from the same coast. Source 1.

Scope of reading: the PLOS ONE article of 2019 was read online on 24 October 2026, in the parts needed for the facts here: the abstract, introduction, results and discussion. The individual radiocarbon values in its Table 1 were not read, so this page gives no individual dates and no conversion to BCE.