Resilient cities: renewal after disaster in three late antique towns of the East Mediterranean

A new evaluation of archaeological research at the three sites of Baysān, Fiḥl, and ‎Jarash of historic Palestine and Jordan has exposed the negative influence of entrenched paradigms in interpreting excavation results. This chapter explains how resilience theory, when partnered with a longue durée approach and other theoretical models, has proven to be an effective way to unpick and ‎question previous misconceptions surrounding obtuse concepts of decline and abandonment in ‎the study of urban landscapes after antiquity. Seeking, understanding, and applying new evidence, while revitalising past work, opens new insights on how towns, even when traumatized by disasters, navigated a successful and sustainable path out of late antiquity and well into Islamic times. In this study on the trichōra of Baysān, Fiḥl, and Jarash‎, we observe that the underlying principles ‎of urban life were already striding towards a significant reset during the first half of the eighth century CE; that ‎reset came abruptly and comprehensively with the AD 749 earthquake. What followed was not a cognitive and corporeal ‎vacuum but, rather, a tangible expression of the new features necessary for ensuring the ‎survival and functioning of these three significant district towns of the Jund al-Urdunn in the ninth and following centuries.