Ancient Roman Mausoleum No Match for Earthquake

The Romans built their monuments solidly enough to last for millennia, but not without the wear and tear that time, elements and events can produce to turn pristine structures into romantic ruins. Such is the case for a Roman mausoleum that was built below a sheer cliff, commanding a well-designed view of the forum and castle that spread below it in the ancient city of Pinara in Turkey. 

In this case, according to researchers at the University of Cologne, much of its damage was caused by an earthquake. It had been knocked off-kilter, its massive building blocks shifted and part of its pediment collapsed. At first, archaeologists and seismologists were not certain how the mausoleum sustained its damage. An earthquake seemed likely, but the mausoleum is also built under a cliff honeycombed with numerous other tombs, and damage from a rockfall seemed possible. To make the determination, research leader Klaus-G. Hinzen and colleagues mapped the position of each part of the mausoleum using laser scans, and transferred 90 million data points collected from the scans into a 3-D computer model of the tomb. They then ran several damage simulations on the 3-D model, concluding that rockfall was not a likely cause of damage, but that an earthquake with magnitude 6.3 would be sufficient to produce the observed damage pattern to the mausoleum’s heavy stone blocks.

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Perspective view of the terrain surrounding the ancient city of Pinara, the extension of which is indicated by the dashed line. The three photos on the right side of the figure show the steep behind the mausoleum covered with Lycian graves, the mausoleum, and the Roman theatre of Pinara (top to bottom). The numbers in white give elevation in meters.

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The three photos (top row left to right) of the Roman mausoleum of Pinara were taken in May 2009 with view from the southeast, west , and north, respectively. The second row shows orthographic views of the south, west and north wall, respectively, constructed from the laser scan point cloud. A scale is shown at the center figure. The bottom row shows three perspective views of the reconstructed discrete element model from roughly the same perspective as the photos above. Darker block color indicates reconstruction of missing parts of estimated measures due to a blocked view in the laser scan. Capital letters shown in the west wall were used as labels for the rows of blocks; A is used for the ceiling of the burial chamber.         

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There were other clues to support their conclusion. They had seen other signs of strong seismic activity in Pinara, most notably a raised edge to the ancient town’s Roman theater that appeared to be due to activity along a fault. Their new finding gives seismologists a new data point to consider when they calculate the likely earthquake hazards for this southwestern region of Turkey. 

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Information for this article was adapted from a press release of the University of Cologne and the detailed study, “Quantitative Archeoseismological Study of a Roman Mausoleum in Pinara (Turkey) – Testing Seismogrenic and Rockfall Damage Scenarios,” by Klaus-G. Hinzen, Helen Kehmeier and Stephan Schreiber of Cologne University, published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA).

Images courtesy Klause-G. Hinzen, et. al., the University of Cologne and the Seismological Society of America, from “Quantitative Archeoseismological Study of a Roman Mausoleum in Pinara (Turkey) – Testing Seismogrenic and Rockfall Damage Scenarios,” by Klaus-G. Hinzen, Helen Kehmeier and Stephan Schreiber of Cologne University .

*Republished with permission from Popular Archaeology