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Courtesy Ephraim Stern
Polished and cleaned, pieces of the silver hoard sparkle as they might have 3,000 years ago. Although most silver hoards found in Palestine consist mainly of pieces of broken jewelry, the Dor hoard is made up of small tokens resembling coins. These pieces, which have a gold content of about 11 percent, may be Iberian in origin: Silver mined at Rio Tinto in Spain in the 11th and 10th centuries B.C.E. possessed similar quantities of gold.