During the course of work relating to new road construction above Aosta’s northern ring-road, the edge of a small rock cut room emerged. It had a rectangular plan with the entrance facing downhill. Inside, a raised hearth had been built in a corner, delimited by stones. Amongst the blackened patches consistent with combustion residue identified on the floor and amongst the cobbles around the base of the hearth, two coins were recovered. In a bad state of preservation they were identified as a late Republican as (2nd-1st century B.C.) and a quadrans (1st century B.C.). The occupation and abandonment levels produced a large quantity of finds of which a high percentage was local impasto pottery, cooking jars and three-legged cooking dishes, associated with fragments of black glaze ware of Padovan production, body sherds and stoppers from amphorae and thin-walled ware beakers. The abundance of pottery would seem to attest the commercial contact between the local population and the Romans in a period just before the foundation of Augusta Prætoria.

Wide parallel rock cut grooves, uncovered near the “hut” can probably be linked to a pathway which climbed the left bank of the Buthier. In the late Roman period this was overlain by a paved road. Traces of Iron Age settlement are frequent in the area of the torrent’s alluvial fan and may attest a connecting pathway at the foot of the hill. Traces of walled structures outside the “hut” were associated with late Imperial pottery. Together with a burial without grave goods, delimited by and covered with stones found along the cobbled road, they indicate continuous occupation and/or organised life in the central Roman period and beyond. (Patrizia Framarin – Alessandra Armirotti)