The Necropolis Next Door

About a month ago, archeologists discovered a Roman-era cemetery on a building site a block away from my apartment in Beirut. Apparently these kinds of discoveries happen all the time in Lebanon, which has seen more than its fair share of human history. Lebanon's Department of Antiquities estimates that less than 40 percent of the country's significant archeological sites have been discovered and recorded. The physical remains of the past are layered so thickly in some places -- such as in Byblos, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world -- that you're not allowed to dig an outhouse without an archeological assessment.

Though real estate developers almost never alert the government when they accidentally dig up evidence from the ancient world, finding a 2,000 year-old graveyard on your land is not necessarily a business disaster. Only in rare cases of spectacular remains does the government expropriate real estate. More often, experts will preserve the find "in record" by excavating, studying, then removing the finds from the site. Other options include redesigning the development to include the find, or reassembling the ruins on a different spot on the same plot. In most cases, the cost to the developers -- who must help pay for the excavation -- adds no more than 1.5 percent to the cost of the total project.

In this case, the Roman-era resting place will soon give way to one of the many luxury condo towers that are taking over this part of town. During Roman times, my neighborhood, which is on a hill overlooking what was once the old city, was a necropolis, a city of the dead. Nowadays it's slightly livelier, the epicenter of Beirut's Frenchified bourgeoisie. But the poor buggers buried here back then would have been of your average sort. None of the 34 graves discovered so far are grand tombs worth stopping what now passes for progress.

Nevertheless, there is still much to learn from such a discovery. For one thing, archaeologists will be looking for confirmation of an emerging new theory about the area's burial sites. Apparently even in the ancient world, the people who lived in what is now Lebanon were also very trendy. At the beginning of the Roman era, in 64 BC, funereal artifacts -- such as jewelry and housewares laid to rest with the deceased -- were varied in style and tended to be made according to local traditions. But with time, local products took on a standardized quality similar to what existed throughout the global empire.

While giving me a tour of the neighborhood necropolis, Assad Seif, the manager of excavations at the Department of Antiquities, said that many people are often surprised that his department is so concerned about the past at a time when the country is in the midst of political and economic crises, having just survived one war and teetering on the brink of another. The reality, said Seif, is that Lebanon's cultural heritage is always in a state of crisis: war destroys the architecture that you know about, and development destroys that which is yet to be discovered. "Archeology is not the first priority in a crisis," he said. "But I have a job to do and I will do it. If everyone else behaved that way we would all live happily ever after."

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut