12/30/2023 0 Comments Bucked up heat![]() "This town continually played its cards right, it was always forging relations with communities between Rome and southern Italy while thriving as a trading hub." It would have been valuable to Julius Caesar as he sought to consolidate support across Italy during the civil wars." Launaro, a Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, said, "Interamna Lirenas was strategically located between a river and a major road, and it was a thriving node in the regional urban network. Rather the archaeologists' findings help to explain why the town would have appealed to Caesar. Launaro argues that this did not make it exceptional or explain the town's long-term success. The team's re-appraisal of an inscription found in the nineteenth century (now lost) confirms that Interamna Lirenas gained the patronage of Julius Caesar in 46 B.C., but Dr. We now know that wasn't the case." Julius Caesar Launaro said, "Based on the relative lack of imported pottery, archaeologists have assumed that Interamna Lirenas was a declining backwater. At its peak, the town would have housed around 2000 people. This showed that the town actually resisted decline until the later part of the 3rd century A.D., around 300 years later than previously assumed. (at around 74 acres), before shrinking to around 25 acres by the 1st century A.D.īut Launaro and his colleagues mapped the town's development using a far larger and more reliable body of excavated evidence, tens of thousands of pieces of commonware pottery. They also launched a series of targeted excavations around the forum.įorty years ago, Canadian archaeologists studied the distribution of fineware and amphorae potsherds in the ploughsoil above Interamna Lirenas and concluded that the town's occupation peaked in the late 2nd to early 1st centuries B.C. It's just that archaeologists have only recently begun to apply the right techniques and approaches to see this."īecause the site was mostly open fields, the archaeologists were able to conduct a magnetic and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of around 60 acres. We think many other average Roman towns in Italy were just as resilient. We're not saying that this town was special, it's far more exciting than that. We found a thriving town adapting to every challenge thrown at it for 900 years. But what we discovered wasn't a backwater, far from it. "There was nothing on the surface, no visible evidence of buildings, just bits of broken pottery. ![]() Alessandro Launaro, the study's author and Interamna Lirenas Project lead at the University of Cambridge's Classics Faculty. "We started with a site so unpromising that no one had ever tried to excavate it-that's very rare in Italy," said Dr. ![]() The team's pottery analysis indicates that the town's decline began around 300 years later than previously assumed, while a systematic geophysical survey has produced an astonishingly detailed image of the entire town's layout, highlighting a wide range of impressive urban features. Their thirteen-year study-published today in the edited volume "Roman Urbanism in Italy"-shows that the town in Southern Lazio continued to thrive well into the 3rd century A.D., bucking what is normally considered Italy's general state of decline in this period. New findings from Interamna Lirenas, traditionally written off as a failed backwater in Central Italy, change our understanding of Roman history, its excavators believe.
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