Ancient Tyre and Its Harbours: 5000 Years of Human-Environment Interactions
Journal of Archaeological Science 35 (2008) 1281e1310 http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jas Ancient Tyre and its harbours: 5000 years of human-environment interactions Nick Marriner a,*, Christophe Morhange a, Nicolas Carayon b a CEREGE CNRS UMR 6635, Universite´ Aix-Marseille, Europoˆle de l’Arbois, BP 80, 13545 Aix-en-Provence cedex 04, France b CNRS UMR 7044, Etude des civilisations de l’antiquite´, Universite´ de Strasbourg II, MISHA, 5, alle´e du ge´ne´ral Rouvillois, CS 50008, 67083 Strasbourg Cedex, France Received 4 June 2007; received in revised form 20 September 2007; accepted 21 September 2007 Abstract The exact location and evolution of Tyre’s ancient harbour areas have been matters of scholarly conjecture since the 16th century. Here, we use geoscience techniques to precisely relocate the ancient northern harbour, the city’s principal transport hub during antiquity, and reconstruct its geomorphological evolution (Marriner, N., Morhange, C., Boudagher-Fadel, M., Bourcier, M., Carbonel, P., 2005. Geoarchaeology of Tyre’s ancient northern harbour, Phoenicia. Journal of Archaeological Science 32, 1302e1327.). While a natural anchorage is inferred during the Bronze Age, we expound the increasing weight of anthropogenic forcings from the Iron Age onwards, culminating in a technological apogee during the Byzantine period (Hohlfelder, R.L., 1997. Building harbours in the early Byzantine era: the persistence of Roman technology. By- zantinische Forschungen Internationale Zeitschrift fu¨r Byzantinistik 24, 367e389.). Using coastal stratigraphy and underwater archaeological data (El Amouri, M., El Helou, M., Marquet, M., Noureddine, I., Seco Alvarez, M., 2005. Mission d’expertise arche´ologique du port sud de Tyr, sud Liban: re´sultats preliminaries.
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