Bronze Age Turkish Site Shows Two Earthquakes, Two Responses: People Rebuilt After the First and Left After the Second

Excavations at Panaztepe, an Early Bronze Age settlement in western Turkiye, uncovered architectural damage from two earthquakes that struck during the third millennium BC. The first quake led to rebuilding and adaptation. The second ended with abandonment. The study appears in the journal Antiquity (volume 100, issue 413, October 2026) and is open access.

A settlement on a fragile fault zone

Panaztepe sits in the Menemen district of İzmir province, in the central Gediz Delta on the Gediz Graben, a fault-bounded basin about 140 km long and 10 to 15 km wide. In the third millennium BC the site stood on an island or peninsula. Today it lies about 8.9 km from the sea. People lived there from about 3000 BC until the early 20th century AD, and excavations began in 1985.

The first earthquake

Ümit Gündoğan and Ümit Çayır Tığlı date the first destruction horizon to Phase I, about 3000 to 2700 or 2650 BC. In two buildings, load-bearing walls show snake-type undulation and tilt eastward. The roofs collapsed, and a fire then burned the roof beams and reddened the clay. Pottery, large storage jars, animal bones and marine shells lay in place beneath the burnt debris, which suggests that the occupants fled without collecting their belongings.

The community did not leave. According to the authors, residents thickened their walls, used larger stones and changed the settlement pattern. They read this as a deliberate strategy to reduce seismic risk.

The second earthquake

The second horizon belongs to Phase III, which the authors date to the second half of the third millennium BC. Damage appears in seven adjacent buildings. An entrance wall fell eastward as a block over about 2.5 m. Another wall tilted about 40 degrees to the south, and mudbrick collapsed into the neighboring building. Several walls show snake-type and lateral undulation. The authors say a single event best explains this deformation pattern.

Builders in this phase had made walls thinner again on the same foundations. The authors interpret that change as fading social memory of the first disaster. Long shared walls of about 25 m between houses and poorly interlocked masonry at the corners increased the damage. The second quake damaged almost every building, and the authors say the harm exceeded the community’s capacity to recover, which led to abandonment.

Other sites reacted differently

The authors compare Panaztepe with nearby sites. Liman Tepe recovered and rebuilt, Bakla Tepe shrank and reorganized, and Yassıtepe was abandoned after a second quake.

What the evidence can and cannot show

Collapsed walls, fallen columns or cracks cannot prove an earthquake on their own, because non-seismic causes exist. The authors therefore rely on combined indicators: artifacts left in place, fire, widespread destruction and changes in the settlement. They also note that confirming whether regional destruction layers from the first phase came from one event or several is difficult, and that the Phase III horizon has no known parallel in the regional record. Interpretations about collective organization and lost memory remain inferences.

Source: Gündoğan, Ü. & Çayır Tığlı, Ü., “Destruction and resilience at Panaztepe: archaeoseismological evidence for third-millennium BC earthquakes in Western Anatolia,” Antiquity 100(413), 2026, pp. 1219-1238 (DOI 10.15184/aqy.2026.10376, CC BY 4.0).