HAIFA, ISRAEL—According to a Live Science report, evidence from trash mounds near the site of Elusa, which is located in Israel’s Negev Desert, reflect the city’s struggles at the onset of the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the Justinian plague. Guy Bar-Oz of the University of Haifa and his colleagues recovered pottery fragments, seeds, olive pits, charcoal, and traces of foods imported from the Red Sea and the Nile River. Radiocarbon dating of organic material in the trash mounds suggests they were used over a period of about 150 years, up until the mid-sixth century A.D., when the trash deposits stopped. This suggests there had been a failure in the trash-collection infrastructure. It had been previously thought that the Byzantine Empire enjoyed widespread economic success during this period, as Emperor Justinian expanded his rule across Europe, Africa, and Asia, Bar-Oz explained. “Instead, we are seeing a signal for what was really going on at that time and which has long been nearly invisible to most archaeologists—that the empire was being plagued by climatic disaster and disease,” he said. The region fell to Islamic rule in the seventh century. To read in-depth about exploration of the wreck of a Byzantine merchant ship, go to “Shipping Stone.”
