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Excavation

  • Peltuinum
  • Prata d’Ansidonia e S. Pio delle Camere
  • Peltuinum
  • Italy
  • Abruzzo
  • Province of L'Aquila
  • San Pio delle Camere

Tools

Credits

  • The Italian Database is the result of a collaboration between:

    MIBAC (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali - Direzione Generale per i Beni Archeologici),

    ICCD (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione) and

    AIAC (Associazione Internazionale di Archeologia Classica).

  • AIAC_logo logo

Summary (English)

  • This season, research continued to concentrate on the theatre building with the post-antique structures that reused the area and its walls, but was also extended to the upper terrace. Here, sondages were opened in the forum area and along the via Claudia Nova, built on the line of the drove-road on either side of which the Roman city was founded.

    Theatre. Work continued in the area in front of the post-antique workers’ quarter, at the height of the hyposcaenium . Here, the seventh shaft forming part of the system for manoeuvring the curtain was identified but not excavated. Over one metre of the shaft was demolished by interventions in the post-antique period during the construction of the fort that stands on the theatre’s southern end and subsequently for the creation of the workers’ quarter. The shaft was buried by a substantial layer of silty soil mixed with rubble. The materials found in the stratigraphic contexts link the dismantling of the shaft with the period of incastellamento (Forum ware) and the reconstruction of the church of S. Paolo (c. 200m further north along the southern edge of the plateau) in the 14th century (archaic majolica).

    Forum area. A strip of terrain at a tangent to the west side of the temple-portico complex was cleaned and a number of sondages opened in the forum square.
    To the west of the triple portico, previous excavations had identified a via glareata at a higher level than the portico floor – reconstructable from the column plinths that survived the various episodes of robbing -, and the floor of the square, documented by several paving slabs preserved near the north-western entrance to the portico.

    The road bed is 10 Roman feet wide with a kerb on the west and a low retaining wall, one Roman foot wide, on the east side. The glareata surface, preserved in patches, presented numerous repairs using pottery fragments. The retaining wall was in opus incertum, while the wall bordering the portico was built in opus reticulatum. The distance between the two walls was half a Roman foot. An overall analysis suggests the construction sequence was the following: 1. construction of the retaining wall in order to regularise the profile of the lower natural terrace west of the sacred area; 2. construction of the exterior wall of the portico, working from its interior.

    The sondages inside the forum revealed: 1. a large dump of mixed material in ploughed soil; however, the excavation documented a layer with limestone chippings and pottery dating to the 5th – 6th centuries probably relating to the first robbing of the forum paving; 2. pits containing dumped material, dug in order to free the terrain of bulky materials that inhibited ploughing.
    On the western side of the forum, small patches of two beaten floor surfaces were preserved, cut by a midden.

    Roads and residential structures. The investigations along the drove-road on the plateau identified a series of housing sectors. Walls in opus reticulatum, opus incertum and mud-brick on a stone footing were revealed below a generally minimal fill. The floors were either beaten surfaces or mosaic neither type being associated with a specific type of walling. Where present the stratigraphy indicated contemporary use.
    The excavation opened across the pathway that is the only trace of the drove-road exposed the crossroads of the via Claudia Nova and an orthogonal road, whose gravel surface had been re-laid in several phases causing the level of the roadbed to rise. A collapsed structure at one corner of the crossroads was partially excavated.

  • Luisa Migliorati - Sapienza Università Roma  

Director

Team

  • Antonella Pansini - –Sapienza Università di Roma
  • Claudia Micari
  • Dario Canino
  • Federica Pirré
  • Giulio Casazza
  • Ilaria Trivelloni - –Sapienza Università di Roma
  • Leonardo Radicioni
  • Luca Volpi
  • Tiziana Sgrulloni

Research Body

Funding Body

Images

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