Disaster and Debris: Remaking Society in Post-Earthquake Kourion

Ian Randall, postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia and pottery analyst for the Kourion Urban Space Project (KUSP), examines how the inhabitants of Kourion responded to the devastating late fourth-century earthquake and compares this recovery with changes across Cyprus after the Arab raids of the seventh century.

Randall frames the lecture through Shannon Dawdy's concept of a "taphonomy of disaster", which uses post-catastrophe rebuilding and rubbish disposal to observe how a community is structured, who directs recovery, and which areas are left behind. In the Late Roman and early Byzantine empires, central imperial relief after earthquakes was usually limited to tax remission, as at Salamis Constantia after the earthquake of 342. Physical rebuilding fell largely to local secular elites of the curial class and, increasingly from the fourth century onwards, to bishops and church authorities.

At Kourion, a series of fourth-century earthquakes culminated in a destructive event in the late fourth century, identified by Soren at the Earthquake House with the quake of 365 CE or shortly thereafter. While the traditional narrative posits decades of near-total abandonment before the three-aisled Christian basilica (dated by Megaw between the 410s and 430s) was erected, Randall brings together earlier excavation records from Daniel, McFadden, Stillwell, and Christou to show continuous, smaller-scale habitation. The late fourth-century House of Eustolios provided baths and a guesthouse, while humbler dwellings built of spolia occupied the ruined theatre, the agora, and the House of the Gladiators.

Drawing on KUSP excavations of a second-century elite building on the southern bluff next to the Earthquake House, directed by Tom Davis and Laura Swantek, Randall shows that this sector had already been subdivided by the fourth century. After the earthquake, neither building was cleared of human remains or collapse; instead, the KUSP area was used for four distinct episodes of dumping debris cleared from wealthier parts of town, containing coins, an Egyptian glass millefiori plate, and large, unrepaired sherds of red slip fine ware. Re-examining McFadden and Daniel's unpublished pottery in the Episkopi Museum, Randall contrasts fill-like assemblages from the theatre with the higher concentration of fine wares and fewer pithoi at the House of Eustolios.

The final section places fourth-century Kourion alongside seventh-century Cyprus, when Arab raids in 649 and 653 and the 688 treaty between Byzantium and the Umayyad Caliphate disrupted state-subsidized shipping and the import of red-slipped fine wares. As dining pottery became localized across the island, the appearance of imported Constantinopolitan glazed whiteware signals new class and administrative differentiation tied to the imperial capital.