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Caesarea is located along the coast of Israel, north of Tel Aviv and south of Haifa. It was built by Herod the Great, sometime between 22 and 10 BCE, and named in honor of Caesar Augustus, his patron. The artificial harbor built by Herod was named Sebastos, the Greek name for Augustus. Josephus calls the city Caesarea by the Sea, from which it gets its name Caesarea Maritima. It was built on the site of Straton’s Tower, a Hellenistic-Phoenician town, but no certain remains of the town have survived The city. Josephus’s description of Herod’s city, which includes a royal palace of unique splendor, a temple to Augustus, a theater, a forum, an amphitheater (he probably has the hippo-stadium in mind), and especially an artificial harbor, have been confirmed by the excavations of the site.

The site of Caesarea had been explored and studied since the nineteenth century, but formal excavations did not begin until the 1960s when the harbor and the temple mount were first excavated. Beginning in the 1970s, multiple groups excavate the site. The American Joint Expedition to Caesarea Maritima under the direction of Robert J. Bull, excavated twelve seasons from 1971 to 1987. They uncovered the lower aqueduct, a number of areas in the Old City, parts of the Byzantine governor’s house, a Byzantine bath, and began excavating the hippo-stadium. In the later 1970s, Lee I. Levine and Ehud Netzer excavated an Islamic dwelling quarter in the Old City and Herod's promontory palace. In the 1980s, the Caesarea Ancient Harbour Excavation Project, under the direction of Avner Raban, began systematic exploration of the harbor and its construction. In the 1990s, the Combined Caesarea Expeditions, under the direction of Kenneth G. Holum and Raban, continued the exploration of the harbor and excavated the inner harbor, which had been covered over with silt, and the temple platform. A team from the University of Pennsylvania further excavated the promontory palace. Finally, beginning in the 1990s, the Israel Antiquities Authority began excavating large sections of Caesarea for the purpose of establishing a national archeological park. Excavation and restoration of the site continues into the present day.

The archaeological strata uncovered at the site, as illustrated in the site plan, date to the following periods:

	Crusader Period
	Byzantine Period
	Roman Period