Geotechnical Study on the Hellenistic stone retaining wall of the Upper Agora in Ephesus under static and seismic loading
Geotechnical Study on the Hellenistic stone retaining wall of the Upper Agora in Ephesus under static and seismic loading
This study presents a geotechnical investigation on the Hellenistic retaining wall of the Upper Agora in Ephesus, western Türkiye. Stability analyses under static and seismic loading conditions were carried out to evaluate the long-term performance of the Hellenistic retaining wall, which was built without mortar in the 2nd century BCE. To achieve this, a multidisciplinary study was carried out in the fields of archaeology and building research, geology, and geotechnical engineering. The motivation of this study is to perform stability analyses of the ancient retaining wall in accordance with conventional standards and norms. The Mononobe-Okabe (M-O) method was applied to calculate the dynamic earth pressure coefficients in the earthquake analyses. Thus, in the seismic stability analyses a pseudo-static approach was used. The 30 October 2020 Samos Island earthquake was adopted as the reference seismic event due to its proximity, well-recorded ground motions, and relevance to the active tectonic regime of western Anatolia. According to the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute (KOERI), the magnitude of the earthquake is Mw = 6.9 and the depth is 10 km. The results of the analyses under static loading according to the sliding and bearing capacity failure show that the stability design numbers are satisfied, and that the overturning safety is almost fulfilled. Under seismic loading, the values were obtained less than 1,0 according to the sliding and bearing capacity failure analyses taken into consideration the peak ground acceleration agr values recorded by the Kusadasi station (code 0905) corresponding to the Samos Island earthquake event.
Cihan Taylan Akdag; F. Rackwitz; Daniel Musall; Thekla Schulz-Brize; Altug Hasoezbek
4th International Symposium on the Preservation of Monuments and Historic Sites
Seismic Behaviour of Heritage Monuments: Observation, Modelling and Mitigation
https://doi.org/10.53243/tc301-2026-15