In my research on Jerash (Jordan) after the earthquake of 749 CE, anchoring has become a valuable tool to help reconstruct human behaviour and understand the resilience of societies after devastating and life-altering natural catastrophes.
In the middle of the eighth century CE, a series of earthquakes along the Red Sea Transform (conventionally known as the earthquake of 749) devastated cities and countryside in the region of what is today northern Jordan, Israel and Palestine, and southern Syria. The evidence is both textual and archaeological, and modern seismologists have estimated a magnitude of 7.5 or higher. The earthquake coincided with the political disintegration of the Umayyad caliphate and the rise of the Abbasids, who founded the city of Baghdad in 762 as their new seat of power. In modern scholarship, this political move away from the Mediterranean world and towards the East has been seen as reducing the incentive to rebuild settlements affected by the mid-eighth-century earthquakes. Exceptions included cities with political or religious significance, such as Tiberias and Jerusalem, whereas towns such as Jerash in northern Jordan were seen as largely abandoned. The few post-earthquake remains that were recovered were described by early excavators as wretched hovels, and their occupants as squatters.
It was a combination of factors that brought me to the topic of the earthquake of 749. In 2015, I initiated a new project in Jerash with the main aim of examining a residential neighbourhood in the town’s southwest quadrant. The project’s research questions concern the organisation of residential spaces and the infrastructure of daily life, such as water supply systems, rubbish disposal, and the layout of streets and alleys. I expected to find material dating mainly from the fifth to the mid-eighth century, with some remains from earlier centuries, but already in the first season of excavation, it became clear that we had significant post-earthquake occupation. Until this point, post-earthquake occupation had only been securely documented in the urban centre, in and immediately around the congregational mosque.
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Abbasid house in Jerash’s southwest quadrant, Roman colonnaded street and North Theatre in the background. © Marlena Whiting |
Our findings in Jerash’s southwest quadrant have led to a frustration with the way that earlier scholarship in particular has seen the earthquake of 749 as a catalyst for abandonment and total societal change, without also asking questions about the people who, at the time, would have called Jerash their home. This misconception comes in part from the traditional archaeological focus on monuments and from a corresponding lack of attention to the houses, infrastructure, and everyday spaces that constituted the fabric of daily life.
But if we, as scholars, choose to assume that the earthquake led to urban abandonment, we also need to ask what happened to the town’s inhabitants. Are we assuming that they perished in the earthquake, or that they went somewhere else? If so, where did they go? How did they live? And by what means did they support themselves?
People’s relationships with the places that we call home are highly complex. We are bound to places through economic ties, including ownership of land or buildings. But we are also anchored to places through memory and nostalgia, through shared family history, friendships and childhood experiences, and through our intimate knowledge of the landscape and the built environment in the places where we grew up or have lived for many years. For these reasons, uprooting and moving somewhere else is, in most cases, not the most straightforward solution – even after a major catastrophic event.
Our excavations in southwest Jerash have uncovered a residential neighbourhood with several structures that were rebuilt after the earthquake of 749 CE. One house has provided particularly useful evidence for post-749 occupation. So far, we have excavated a couple of rooms and part of an open courtyard in the southern part of this residential building that was abandoned after a fire. The fire caused the roof to collapse, sealing the household contents beneath it. One room was used for storing foodstuffs and ceramic cooking vessels, as well as everyday items such as loom weights and grinding stones. Radiocarbon dating of carbonised grains and lentils suggests that the building remained in use until the late eighth or ninth century.
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| Ceramic vessels and lamps recovered from the post-749 house © LAJP |
The building itself also preserves evidence of earlier collapse and rebuilding. Paving stones in the courtyard were found crushed, while walls had been re-erected following the same layout but using different building techniques. Altogether, the evidence suggests a house that was rebuilt according to its previous layout after the earthquake of 749, but using building materials of lesser quality, probably because they were reused from the collapsed structure. The house then continued to be occupied until its eventual destruction by fire.
Although our archaeological remains cannot reveal the processes that led people to choose to rebuild rather than relocate, anchoring provides a useful way of thinking about the motivations and decisions that might lead people to remain in, or return to, their homes even after near-total devastation. It also allows us to consider resilience not simply in terms of rebuilding what was lost, but in terms of adapting familiar spaces and maintaining connections to places that continued to hold meaning, even when the physical environment had changed profoundly.
Louise Blanke (University of Edinburgh)
Louise Blanke is a senior lecturer in Late Antique Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, and the director of the Late Antique Jerash Project (LAJP). She is a specialist in the archaeology of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in the Near East, especially Egypt and Jordan. Her research examines the emergence of Christianity and Islam and their impact on economy, built environment, and material culture.