Villa Magna

Site D Summary 14-18 July

The second week of July proved to be a productive and exciting week in our trench. We threw our manpower into the eastern side of the trench in order to take all of our rooms down to the same phase and expose one occupation of our building. Room 7 yielded many a surprise for a 3 by 3 meter space: hole after hole after hole, including a dolium pit and a hearth, both of which suggest a domestic occupation.

The drain in the corresponding corridor became more complicated than we anticipated. It too contained several complicated cuts, one of which seems to have been a medieval pit smacked into the second phase of the drain. In this area of the drain, we found a bunch of medieval pot fragments, which have thrown us for a loop since we anticipated an earlier date for our occupants. One explanation for this intrusion could be that one phase of our drain is in fact much later than the occupation and even the destruction of the building. A question that remains to be answered…

In room 11, we removed the last of the destruction level on the E side of the ditch. Underneath the destruction, we found a level of abandonment or perhaps a battuto floor, which suggests, again, that our occupants were not of wealthy means—no lords (or emperors!) here.

On the western side of the ditch we more or less halted excavations for several days while we worked on finishing the eastern side of the ditch. Towards the end of the week we started to remove the destruction of the street and reveal the preparation of the street—lots of small, rounded stones. These stones seem to be cut by another large ditch, which perhaps is a robber trench for a large wall that works together with the ditch as a defense in a later occupation phase.

Our idea for the interpretation of this building remain primarily barracks, but the finds from the drain include large numbers of hairpins, which suggests that women played a significant role as occupants of the building—unusual for a barracks… we shall see…

— Ryan Ricciardi· Jul 22, 07:47