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Abstract
The identification of historical events by geological and archaeological evidence is often ambiguous and conflicting, undermining the enormous potential for sub-annual precision in dating. The ruin of one of the largest pottery factories in the Middle East during Byzantine times, recently excavated in Yavneh (central Israel), exemplifies this: aligned fallen walls and columns and a kiln that collapsed while still in operation, with dozens of ceramic storage jars in articulation. Archaeological dating, which limits the time of the collapse to the seventh century CE, cannot distinguish between two large documented earthquakes that occurred during this century. By using pollen grains trapped by the collapse, we were able to distinguish, for the first time, between the two candidate earthquakes: September 634 CE and early June 659 CE. The pollen was extracted from the dust captured on the floor of the kiln during the cooling process of the vessels. The dust was collected only from below in situ whole vessels, and based on our reconstruction had been accumulated for about several days (after the heating process ended and before the collapse). Since the palynological assemblages included spring-blooming plants (such as Olea europaea and Sarcopoterium spinosum) and no common regional autumn bloomers (e.g. Artemisia), it is proposed that the kiln went out of use due to the early June 659 CE earthquake. We also propose that the recovery of the Yavneh workshops was no longer economically worthwhile, maybe in part due to changes in economic and political conditions in the region following the Muslim conquest.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank M. Kitin from the Israel Geological Survey for performing the pollen extraction procedure. I. Ben-Ezra, Y. Gottlieb and D. Porotsky are acknowledged for their help in drawing the figures. Pictures were made available thanks to the courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority (Photo C. Amit).
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Dafna Langgut
DAFNA LANGGUT received her PhD in archaeology in 2008 from Haifa University, Israel. She is the director of the Laboratory of Archaeobotany and Ancient Environments at the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. Her expertise is in Quaternary palynology and paleoecology. Dafna also extracts archaeobotanical remains (i.e. pollen, wood and charcoal) from archaeological sites, and is the curator of the pollen and archaeobotanical collections of the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University.
Eli Yannai
ELI YANNAI works for the Israel Antiquities Authority where he is the senior excavator at the excavations survey and research department. Eli received his PhD. from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1996. His main archaeological excavations are at Ein Asawir, Bet Dagan, Lod, Yavneh, Mishmar Dawid and Natzur.
Itamar Taxel
ITAMAR TAXEL received his PhD in archaeology from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 2011. He is currently the co-director of the Yavneh-Yam Excavation Project and the Yavneh Regional Survey Project, and he is also a research associate at the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures of Tel Aviv University. Itamar specialises in Roman, Byzantine and Islamic archaeology in Israel and the southern Levant, and has participated in the publication of numerous excavations, including the Israel Antiquity Authority excavations at Yavneh.
Amotz Agnon
AMOTZ AGNON studies dynamic processes of geology such as earthquakes, volcanoes and sea level changes, and their destructive impacts. Following research on regional tectonics, he now principally focuses on destruction layers in the Levant. His PhD research at the University of California, Berkeley (1988) addressed the thermo-elasticity of the Earth's mantle with implications for seismic tomography.
Shmuel Marco
SHMUEL MARCO received his PhD from the Hebrew University in Israel. He is currently Professor of geology at Tel Aviv University. His research topics include palaeoseismology, earthquake effects on archaeological structures and natural sediments, soft sediment deformation, and the secular variation of the geomagnetic field.