Sector 17-O
In 1937, after five seasons of fruitless efforts to find major monuments of antiquity at Antioch, the leaders of the expedition decided to excavate a section of the site that they believed, on the basis of its relation to the known locations of the main street and the transverse stream, would produce the remains of the Forum of Valens, described in lavish detail by late antique authors. Direction of the dig was entrusted to Jean Lassus, of the Musées Nationaux de France, who warned the planners that the spot chosen was a bit removed from the site of the actual Forum. After hundreds of diggers spent months opening a trench ten meters wide, sixty meters long, and as much as ten meters deep, the misgivings of Lassus proved well founded; only the small corner of a water feature showed any evidence of being part of an ancient monumental ensemble, and most of the levels contained the complex remains of modest homes, shops, and productive facilities dating from the late Antique through the Crusader periods. In light of these disappointing results, Sector 17-O was written up in a cursory fashion in less than two pages of the report of the final years of the excavation.
A record of continued occupation over the course of fifteen centuries for the common activities of urban life is of more interest to archaeologists and historians of the twenty-first century than it was to those of the first half of the twentieth. Sector 17-O has been the center of the study of an international team of scholars since 2007, who have located all of the physical and archival material relating to the sector and have organized and photographed the documents and maps and have dated the artefacts and coins. This material served as the basis for the class on ‘Antioch through the Ages: Archaeology and History,’ taught in the spring semester of 2015 by Dr. Alan M. Stahl, which included Princeton undergraduate students of varying backgrounds and specialization. The findings of these students, working in pairs on respective stratigraphic levels, has served as the basis for this and related web pages.
Sector 17-O was the site of continued use and occupation for more than 1500 years. Though literary sources give a foundation date for Antioch about 300 BC, the presence of a neo-Babylonian engraved stone tablet among the excavated material (probably the oldest artefact found in the entire Antioch excavation) suggests the use of the area dating back an additional half millennium. In the Classical period, the sector was the site of the corner of a large construction that appears to have contained water; it was characterized as a Nymphaeum by the excavators, a structure used to honor the nymphs, whose protection of the city’s water supply was crucial to Antioch’s prosperity. This building suffered from severe damage by a fire and an earthquake, but was restored albeit with less lavish materials.
The second phase of the sector’s use can be dated to the late Antique and early Byzantine and Islamic periods. The dominant feature of the neighborhood then was a large commercial complex around a courtyard with a porticoed entrance opening onto the street, a typical Mediterranean configuration that would evolve into the Souk or Funduk of the medieval and modern Islamic world.
In the final period of occupation, from the middle Islamic period to the Crusader period, the buildings in the region of 17-O got more congested and spread into the streets that had bounded the sector since Hellenistic times. The presence of a pottery kiln indicates that the area had added productive facilities to the residential and commercial uses of preceding centuries. The proliferation of complex systems of plumbing shows that the water management efforts of earlier centuries continued to be implemented through the Middle Ages.
All in all, Sector 17-O bears witness to the continued, intensive use of a marginal region of a major urban center by people of varied, and perhaps changing, identity over the course of centuries. The continuity of the habitation and the gradual nature of transformations give a very different view of the history of Antioch than that to be derived from narrative sources that speak mainly of conquests, earthquakes, epidemics and conflicts over religion and ethnicity.