Despite damage from war, looters and agricultural activity, a Roman temple and settlement high in the Lebanese mountains still hold clues about the ancient and medieval people who once lived there, a new study finds. Until now, little was known about Hosn Niha, a Roman-Byzantine village located in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, the researchers said. Built in approximately A.D. 200, the village was home to a Roman temple and a small settlement, they said. In the early 1900s, German archaeologists studied the remains of the temple but paid little attention to the neighboring settlement, which they described in a 1938 study as "a picture of complete ransacking," adding that hardly a trace remained of the settlement's inhabitants. [See Images of the Roman Temple and Remains at Hosn Niha] During the Lebanese Civil War (1975 to 1990), military activity and looting took a heavy toll on the remains of Hosn Niha. In the late 1980s, treasure hunters riding bulldozers scraped through the village, moving and damaging ancient clues buried in the ground, according to the new study. But "even though the core of the village has been irreparably damaged, a significant amount of the site remains in situ [in its original place] and with enough surviving features and structural evidence to warrant further investigation," the researchers wrote in the new study, detailed in the April issue of the journal Antiquity. Their diligence paid off. An analysis of pottery shards scattered around the village shows evidence of a large Greco-Roman settlement and a later medieval occupation, likely during the 13th or 14th centuries, the researchers said. "What we were trying to do is show that sites that have been quite badly damaged by conflict shouldn't just be ignored and forgotten," said study researcher Ruth Young, a senior lecturer of archaeology at the University of Leicester in England. "I think that what we have now is a lot more knowledge about how villages operated and [their] connection with the temple."

• published: 08 May 2015
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