Quarry Industry in Rough Cilicia: The Cases of Dana Island and Kesiktaş

Abstract

The fame of the construction workers originating from Isauria (Rough Cilicia) is a wellknown phenomenon in Late Antique architectural history. In the late fifth and sixth centuries, textual evidence reported Isaurian architects, masons, quarrymen, and ordinary laborers in construction projects in North Syria, Palestine, and Constantinople. Their emergence coincided with the construction upswing across the Eastern Mediterranean. In Isauria, builders had easy access to ordinary building materials, as variations of limestone bedrock are ubiquitous. In this context, two coastal quarries are unique cases illustrating the development of the quarrying industry and trade in ordinary stones. The first example is Dana Island where settlement and quarries co-existed. Quarrying may have started in the early Roman period, while its transformation into an industrial and commercial endeavor is a Late Antique phenomenon. As large-scale quarrying subsided or ended at the end of antiquity, the infrastructure such as coastal ramps, warehouses, and stockpile areas fell out of use. Decrepit buildings were pillaged, their sites were excavated, and quarries were cut through the coastline that had long served the quarry industry. The second case is Kesiktaş, which functioned exclusively as a quarry of industrial proportions but did not have a permanent settlement. Unlike Dana, the chronology of quarrying at Kesiktaş cannot yet be dated. Nevertheless, the stone industry and trade in ordinary building materials were essential in the economy and crafts of Isauria. These two coastal quarries of industrial proportions are unique case studies to explore the use of local geology for stone extraction, the various techniques of quarrying, the size and types of stone blocks that circulated in the sea lanes, and the logistics of the quarrying industry and stone transport. They provide us snapshots of complex taskspaces where the protagonists were the quarrymen, quarry owners, stonecutters, metal workers, and other supporting laborers.

Keywords

• quarrying
• stone trade
• construction industry
• Isaurians
• coastline

References

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