Under the Mediterranean: Tsunamis, Coastscapes, Marsa Bagoush, Tel Akko and Submerged Neolithic Sites

Recorded at the Honor Frost Foundation Conference on Mediterranean Maritime Archaeology in October 2017, this session on maritime cultural landscapes brings together five papers on coastal geoarchaeology, ethnography, anchorages, and submerged settlements across the Mediterranean.

Christophe Morhange opens the session with a critique of how palaeo-tsunamis are identified in ancient harbours. Using case studies at Tipasa in Algeria and the Theodosian Harbour at Yenikapı in Istanbul, he demonstrates the imprecision of radiocarbon dating on displaced coastal boulders and mixed destruction layers. A meta-analysis of 135 published Mediterranean tsunami events conducted with Nick Marriner shows that nearly ninety per cent coincide with periods of heightened storminess, suggesting that many supposed tsunami deposits were caused by storms and are better termed high-energy events.

Mari Yamasaki presents an ethnographic and archaeological framework for defining a coastscape in the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, comparing modern fishing villages in Liguria with ancient sites in the Aegean and Cyprus. She looks at material culture, maritime terminology in Linear B, Ugaritic and Amarna texts (including references to Alashiya), communal fish consumption, ritual, and visibility from the sea. For Cyprus, she cites funerary feasting on fish and mollusks and a bronze fishhook placed under the left shoulder of the deceased in Tomb 5B at Middle Bronze Age Toumba tou Skourou at Morphou, as well as Thierry Petit's argument that the eighth-century BC palace at Amathus had a bright red roof designed to be seen from the sea.

Emad Khalil reports on survey work begun in 2015 at Marsa Bagoush (ancient Zygros), 250 kilometres west of Alexandria. Guided by the third-century AD Stadiasmus Maris Magni, his team recorded shipwrecks and concreted amphora piles from the Hellenistic to the Islamic periods, dominated by Roman Egyptian AE3 transport amphorae alongside a third-century BC stamped Knidian amphora, and traced the ancient guide's reference to "water in the sand" to an interconnected network of underground cisterns and early Roman tombs.

Michal Artzy examines the environmental and urban history of Tel Akko on the northern Israeli coast from the Early Bronze Age to the Persian period. Drawing on environmental records, coring, and electrical resistivity tomography, she shows how the tell began on former Pleistocene kurkar islands, received Cypriot and Egyptian imports through its Middle Bronze IIA Sea Gate, and shifted its anchorages and habitation as the Na'aman River silted up and coastal progradation dried the surrounding plain.

Ehud Galili closes the session with the submerged Neolithic villages of the Carmel coast between Haifa and Atlit. At Pre-Pottery Neolithic C Atlit-Yam (c. 9000 BP), stone-lined water wells, megalithic structures, domesticated wheat, fishhooks, net sinkers, and 85 human burials showing auditory exostosis from cold-water diving, thalassemia, and the earliest known DNA of tuberculosis document an agro-pastoral marine economy. At the later Pottery Neolithic site of Neve-Yam, wooden wells, crushed olive waste and strainers from early olive-oil production, and a stone-cist cemetery separated from the living quarters precede gradual abandonment caused by post-glacial sea-level rise.