Villa Magna

Area D, 16-22th June 2008

This week largely involved cleaning off to the destruction layer (still!) that covers the entire building. We finally reached a clean, photographable state as of Friday morning. The tracks of modern plowing are visible throughout the trench even having cleaned off the topsoil and mixed plow deposits. The building itself contains ten, possibly even twelve, rooms, all of which are approximately the same size, and we do not have the northern, western, and southern external limits of the structure yet. We started drawing these rooms on Saturday and will have the rooms drawn by the end of the first month of excavation. A fourth pilaster, on the same alignment, was found on the W side of the ditch 5004, and it seems that the oldest wall (5022) was cut deliberately to support the portico. The portico certainly corresponds to the building since each pilaster corresponds to an internal cross wall of the structure. We still don’t understand the function of this building (barracks? storage?), which should become clearer as we begin to excavate into the rooms. Its location next to the road (is it a road?) and the portico attached to it might suggest a more functional, rather than extravagant, use?

On the W side of the ditch, the destruction has been cleaned off in the N (over the building), and we have started to see the continuation of the road. One curious aspect of the excavation of this SW corner is the marked jump the road takes. The paving stones of the road are sitting on top of the destruction layer in several spots, which suggests a violent action. We have suggested that this might be the result of an earthquake or perhaps the slipping/settling of the earth.

We plan to open up the rooms once they are drawn, and hopefully, we will open another few meters to the W to expose the western limit of the building and the wall that collapsed to cause so much destruction.

— Ryan Ricciardi· Jun 21, 08:51