CCAP 2023: Searching for the Islamic History of Herod’s Great City
Veronica Morriss, 2023 Eric and Carol Meyers Fieldwork Scholarship Recipient
Caesarea is one of the best known and most researched sites in Israel. It’s famous for Herod the Great’s imposing harbor, the Roman hippodrome and theater, the grand Byzantine octagonal church, and its massive Crusader walls. Caesarea has an extensive history of groundbreaking archaeological research, and numerous excavation teams are usually working at the site at once, uncovering the ancient city, one meter at a time.
While the extensive Roman, Byzantine, and Crusader remains at the site have captured popular imagination and been the primary target for most excavations, the city’s role during the early Islamic era is not well understood—and the port played a more important role in Islamic history than it is given credit for.
The situation at Caesarea mirrors that of research throughout the Levantine coast. The archaeology of the early Islamic period is often neglected due to a combination of factors, including a bias in site selection and a predilection for Classical sites. These biases and gaps in the data have led to debates about the nature of settlement and trade along the coastal region and whether they declined following the Islamic conquest in the 7th century CE. However, over the last several decades, scholars working throughout the region have begun to question the evidence underlying decline narratives and have produced new evidence that creates a more nuanced and dynamic picture of the era.
In part, this reimagining of the Byzantine-Islamic tradition has inspired our research at Caesarea. According to historical sources, Caesarea played an important role during the Islamic conquest and was targeted by the early caliphs and their forces due to the city’s port and its prominent role in Byzantine trade and logistics. Though Caesarea lost its role as capital of the Byzantine province Palaestina Prima after its capture in 640/1 CE, it continued to be inhabited and was tied into the eastern Mediterranean trade networks and the defense of the coast.
As part of the Caesarea Coastal Archaeology Project, our team has been exploring several regions of the ancient city, with a primary focus on those that might have Islamic-era remains. My work has been focused on the area south of the Roman theater, just outside of the park. We chose this area (Area FZ) to get a stratigraphic record of the southernmost end of the city near the Byzantine wall. We were also hoping to find traces of the Byzantine-Islamic fortress that was identified during the mid-20th century Italian excavation in the defunct theater.
Gaming dice.
Last year, we uncovered structural remains and material culture that attest to a complex history of mixed use for the area. While we cannot discuss everything that we discovered prior to publication and reporting to the Israel Antiquities Authority, the finds this year point to significant Crusader-era use of this section of the city, as well as Byzantine-Islamic transitional layers, and a thick deposit of amphorae and storage jars. Tantalizing finds from earlier periods include six-sided gaming dice, carved bone hair pins, spindle whorls, dozens of coins, and even a horse skeleton—which many of the students were excited to uncover, having taken zooarchaeology courses at their universities.
Veronica Morriss earned a PhD in Islamic Archaeology from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. She is a maritime archaeologist, and her research focuses on the development of the Islamic/Byzantine maritime frontier of Syria-Palestine and the cross-cultural interactions that characterized the Eastern Mediterranean and its shores during the Early Islamic Period. She co-manages a digital archaeology company with her husband in Hawaii, and when she is not in the field, she writes fantasy romance novels.
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