Abstract
Throughout mankind’s history, the need to secure and protect the home settlement was an essential one. This holds especially true for the city of Ainos (modern Enez) in Turkish Thrace. Due to its continuous settlement history since the 7th/6th century BC, several different types of city walls were built—sometimes even on top of each other—several of which have been preserved over time. To decipher the construction style, the course and the age of a buried city wall segment in the southern part of the former city, a geoscientific multi-proxy approach including magnetic gradiometer (MG) and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) measurements in combination with granulometrical, sedimentological and microfaunistical investigations on sediment cores was applied. We were able to (1) present reasonable arguments for its Hellenistic age; (2) reveal the course of this wall segment and extrapolate it further north into a less studied area; and (3) demonstrate that in this near-coastal area, the former swampy terrain had been consolidated for constructing the wall. Our multi-proxy approach serves as a valuable example for investigating buried structures in archaeological contexts, avoiding a less-economical, time-consuming, or even forbidden excavation.
Highlights
Several ancient civilisations possessed high-level skills in partially unique methods of construction.Some of these technical abilities have been lost over time, and it is difficult to reproduce them even with modern techniques
Because an archaeological excavation would have been less-economical conductable in the enlarged area of the buried city wall, lateral and vertical changes of the archaeological and sedimentary stratigraphy were studied by combining areal and profile data from magnetic gradiometry (MG) and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) with point data from sediment cores
The city wall was investigated by magnetic gradiometer (MG) on a length of circa 300 m (Figure 3b)
Summary
Several ancient civilisations possessed high-level skills in partially unique methods of construction. Some of these technical abilities have been lost over time, and it is difficult to reproduce them even with modern techniques. This is true for engineering activities relating to the construction of city walls. They were primarily erected to provide security for the settlers and to give shelter in troubled times for the people living nearby. They were an object of the city’s representation, its power, and wealth. City gates were often decorated by rich ornaments to impress incoming guests
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