Roman period

Close to the ancient course of the Castra irrigation ditch, now dry and recently substituted by a channel with raised banks, excavations in trench A uncovered the remains of a single roomed building. Rectangular in plan (10.60 m x 7.20 m = circa 35 × 24 Roman feet) its walls were oriented east-west and north-south. At least two construction phases were identified: the earliest using stones, brick and mortar and the later phase using only brick and mortar. A further intervention in the trench identified the foundation constituted by concrete, which had been poured in liquid form into shuttering formed by wooden planks supported by posts. A number of these post holes were found. The flooring – resting directly on a natural stratum of gravel – was made up of large terracotta slabs or upside down winged tiles, of which two dumped examples were found. This particular building technique and the abundance of tiles, imbrices, slabs and bricks, (almost all stamped with Ti Nucula or variants), in the destruction layers, suggests that in the antique period the supply of materials was guaranteed by the presence of kilns in the area.

On the basis of the pottery evidence the structure, interpreted as a storage facility and not as a dwelling, did not survive beyond the early imperial period. This was a service room belonging to a Roman villa destroyed during the 1970s when sand quarrying began.

The fact that the building was on a perfect east-west alignment on its long side was of great interest. It therefore appeared independent with respect to the principal centuriation axes at Aquileia and corresponded with the alignment of the rustic villa at Pavia di Udine (in its mid 1st century B.C. phase) and the traces of centuriation identified in the area of Tricesimo, which recent research dates to within the first decades of the 1st century B.C.

Pre-Roman period

Evidence for pre-Roman occupation came to light to the west of the Roman building in a number of trenches near the old course of the Castra irrigation ditch. This evidence comprised a surface for pottery working in the form of a levelled area of terracotta fragments probably pertaining to craft-working installations or small kilns and obliteration layers (with three pottery fragments one perhaps of Bronze Age date and two from the iron Age) cut by a series of Roman ploughed surfaces. Therefore, it seems that clay working and the production of terracotta were a tradition in the area over several centuries. There were numerous fragments of coarse and smooth impasto, perhaps interpretable as wall facing, and two fragments of truncated pyramid shaped weights of uncertain function which find parallels in the prehistoric excavations at Concordia.