Mud Flood in Sardis: archaeologists are silent...

Well, naturally, an invading army would be followed by many wagon loads of dirt to dump over the site.

KorbenDallas said:

According to modern estimates based on historical accounts, each of these columns consisted of a single piece of marble over 60 feet long and weighing close to 100 tonnes.

Click to expand...

In the pictures they look like stacked segments. If they were one piece of marble, how did they cut them and stack them so precisely? I know marble is not that hard to cut, but they must have been pretty precise to avoid having a leaning or tipping column.
I like the mini railroad tracks that they appear to have been using to move out the dirt, too bad they don't show the cart. That guy with the pick ax in the fifth picture makes me wince. Be careful!

I have had a thought about this site and it concerns the effects of erosion.
From the image below, you can see the hill above the site is heavily eroded. Vegetation is concentrated in gullies and none of it is particularly tall in growth. This is suggestive of water erosion.
The hill was likely deforested by goat herds as goats will eat anything they can reach and they are surprisingly agile tree climbers. Its also likely the usable tree cover of the hill was logged out possibly during the construction of the temple and the goats simply kept the regrowth down.
Point is at some point erosion gullies began to form and washed away the soils. Topsoil going first and subsoil following and with the complex lying below the gullies the muddy run off could well have built up the kind of soil layer we see being dug out i the black and white photographs.

That it is subsoil is clear from the photos. Its also quite dry but not bone dry and appears fairly easy to remove as evidenced by the type of tools the diggers are holding.

Another possibility is the entire side of the hill went in a landslip of some description. It would most likely be a earthquake which if it were could also account for the ruin of the complex. As there is no apparent evidence of buried trees in the photographs it suggest the tree cover of the hill had vanished at the time of the earthquake, if indeed there was one.
Perhaps the earthquake was enough to cause the landslip and then the water based erosion gullies came later which would make sense as already loosened earth is much easier for water to shift in suspension and is a much more passive deposition process as the flow slows and the soil falls out.

It would have taken a fair while to build up the soil to the depths shown in the various photographs so its probable the site was abandoned without any efforts at recovery.
Anyway those are my ideas on the burial of this site.
Updated Princeton link to the photographs
Source of the aerial image

The direction of the flow is much clearer in this photo from 1910

Edit to add.
Looking at the two photograps and comparing the vegatation spread.
The foreground trees are visible in both photographs and they appear to be the same trees judging from their height.
The area above the foreground tree line is devoid of vegetation in the 1910 photo in comparison to the colour photo. I meam literally devoid as in no growth.
This could be down to goat herding activities as I said they will eat anything green but equally the landslip, if that is what we are looking at, cannot of happened tht much further back from 1910 as subsoil will not support new growth of pioneer species. Pioneer meaning first arrivals that can live die rot and start the process of building a living topsoil.
Its obvious that the trees in the 1910 image are growing on fertile soil and the subsoil must have buried that level of fertile soil surrounding the complex when it moved down hill.

There is over 100 years between the two and assuming the climate over that period was similar to the 100 + years preceeding the 1910 photo if goats were absent then the landslip may well have been in the recent past not distant past which of course throws all estimates of dating for this complex and guesses at who the builders were 'out of the window'.

I get the distinct feeling from this particular site that actual human history has a much shorter and therefore compressed timeline than the official fabricated acdemic narrative serves up.

Second edit to add.
A laugh out loud moment!
Last night I was investigating the Oglethorpe bloke said to be the founder of Savanah Georgia. This morning I was looking again into Sardis and discovered there is a Sardis in Georgia!
Who'd have thunk it?

Another couple of possibilities have arrived.
Could the slope above the complex have been terraced at the time of the landslip?
Or could there have been a dam at the too of the slope which acted as reservoir for the complex and possibly the terrsces?
These ideas came out of perusing this recent aerial photograph.