study day : Man faced with natural risks in antiquity: fatalism, adaptation, resilience
MSH Bordeaux, December 16, 2022

“Man facing hydrological and seismic risks: abandonment or adaptation?
The examples of the Kuban Delta (Russia) and the Hebre Delta (Turkey/Greece) »
Anca Dan, Researcher, CNRS, professor attached to the École Normale Supérieure, anca.dan01[at]gmail.com

Keywords: Ports, adaptation, Kuba Delta, Hèbre Delta

The mouths of large rivers have always been sought by the Greeks and then by the Romans, to establish cities connecting maritime, river and land routes. At the time of the foundations, many islands and especially peninsulas offered natural ports, which could be easily protected from enemies while being close to areas of economic interest (sources of metals, slaves, cereals and distribution markets Aegean handicrafts). However, the progradation of deltas, accentuated by deforestation and soil degradation due to agriculture and livestock breeding, as well as the tectonic processes that we can guess behind the reconstructions of geomorphologists and geophysicists, have endangered and , at times, ended the occupation of many of these sites. A period seems particularly important to us for this decision to stay or to go and found and re-found another city elsewhere: it is the middle of the 1st century BC. BC, which coincides with the end of the Mithridatic wars and with the consolidation of the Roman military presence in the East.

In this presentation we will show the results of interdisciplinary and international work led in Taman (Russia) by the DAI Berlin (Udo Schlotzhauer, Hans-Joachim Gehrke) and the Historical Museum of Moscow (Denis Zhuravlev) with the participation of the Universities of Marburg and Cologne (Helmut Brücker and Daniel Kelterbaum) as well as the CNRS (Anca Dan). We add the most recent results of the Mission of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Ainos and the “Hèbre” project supported by the CNRS, the EFA and the IFEA, as part of a collaboration with the Turkish Ministry of culture (Sait Başaran), the Edirne Museum (Şahan Kırçın) and the universities of Kiel (Excellence Cluster ROOTS, Wolfgang Rabbel and Ercan Erkul), Cologne (Helmut Brückner) and Göttingen (Lyudmila Schumilovskikh).