Ephesus shorelines and sacred harbours. One can see the first settlements were on the highest ground, and descended closer and closer to the shoreline, which kept moving away further and further into the sea. Sediment deposits that filled the valley between the hill above Ephesus and Pion provided an unstable building foundation. The temple of Artemisia is perched on the very edge of a calcerenite (a soft limestone developed from shell calcium) lens. below, right, the degree of sedimentary infilling of Aegean bays and inlets.
John C. Kraft, Helmut Brückner, Ilhan Kayan, and Helmut Engelmann. Geoarcaeology: an International Journal, vol 22, no. 1. p13
from Kraft and Brückner, courtesy Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut
In ‘Urban Design amid Flooding and Sedimentation: the Case of Ephesus’, a study I had done with the engineer Charles Ortloff on the Ephesus water system, it was made clear that one cannot discuss the water system, an inventive and sophisticated distribution of aqueducts and pipes to water-using buildings, without looking at the geological record of Ephesus, a Greek city, then a Roman one, now an archaeological site near Selçuk in Turkey. i ephesus and priene Between 200 BCE and 600 CE – over eight centuries, the shoreline at Ephesus was dramatically altered, with the location and construction of buildings moving around as the landscape changed. Political and geological processes and events destroyed and rebuilt structures many times within the core area. When I was studying Ephesus and its neighbour Priene, my first significant realisation at Ephesus was that archaeologists of the twentieth-century had taken for granted that the modern-day
appearance of the terrain at Ephesus was essentially the same as the arrangements of the Greco-Roman period. Not so! In that earlier time, the shoreline had rapidly moved forward to the southeast, gradually filling in the entire valley. The earliest features of Ephesus are now more than several dozen kilometres inland. This process was repeated in both the Upper Meander and Lower Meander Rivers in the Ephesus area and in the Prienne- Miletus area in the next valley to the south. Peoples had arrived at what is now the Ephesus archaeological site, in the fourth millennium BCE, later exploiting the marble, limstone, dolomite, schist, hornstone and breccia of this terrain for tools and building materials, and for sources of water. The first people settled near springs at or near the later temple of Artemis, or beside creeks that drained the plain between the mountains and the sea, accommodating their settlement sites to the changing valley. The annual deposit of silt in the delta allowed farming; cattle grazed in the swamps; the bay and sea encouraged fishing and marine trade.
Plan of ancient Ephesus with numbered buildings. The city lies between Bulbul Dag and Panayir Dag (mountains)
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Austrian Archaeological Institute, Vienna
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