Villa Magna

Site Summary, 2-8th June 2008

Arrival in good order, no proprietor problems, no wrecks and nobody drownded, fact nothing to laugh at all. Except for the rain, which has been intermittent all week and shows no sign of stopping. We lost one whole afternoon, and most of a morning, together with a lot of too-ing and fro-ing and bailing and scraping mud off boots. The backhoe, too, was thwarted by the weather, and by the end of the week only A4and one of the extensions to B, were open. Some respite on Friday and Saturday allowed us to be more or less presentable for the presentations, with corners of uncleanth remaining. Cleaning was made particularly difficult by the awful geotextile, whose principle virtue appears to be that it is biodegradable, so that when you want to pick it up it falls apart and shreds to the consistency of used toilet paper. Never again. Those areas which had not been backfilled at all had suffered – particularly the Roman mortars, but not at the hands of the roots which had merrily penetrated the geotextile.
The winter clarifies things, excavating and cleaning up walls. This is particularly clear in B, where the cleaner stones and the coloured mortars showed that the door of the campanile was really blocked, or that the large north-south wall in origin simply turned east, rather than relating to a room to the west. The extension shows that the western room continues for at least 10 metres, and it is still entirely unclear where its south wall is. The fact that the lime kiln has become a mosquito breeding tank does not help.
In D, accurate cleaning of the ditch has revealed more postholes; these need to get excavated to explain the structure of the palisade. Fed up with 5 days cleaning, Saturday was spent removing the roof-collapse from two of the rooms in the southern range. I am fairly convinced that the southernmost range of rooms is later than the northern range: floors higher and crummier, walls too. But all of the walls are trench-built, and certainly within formwork. Even breaks along them show clear traces of the ‘boxes’ into which the cement was poured, as do the very irregular facing stones. A couple of coins from the destruction, one of them a pentanummus(?). But what does this make of the fact that the destruction should be mid-fifth or earlier?
The granary trench dug on in spite of the rain, and proves useful, although there is still no sign of the screw press. A1 has revealed a terrific dump of 3rd century pottery behind the phase 3(?) exedra, created by people who knew it would never be visible. The exedra itself appears to have had a sort of podium facing the garden, and the suspicion grows that the statue head found in the garden last year actually belonged to something that fell off it. Ryan confirms Ann’s view that the emperor represented is Balbinus, which works brilliantly with the date of the deposit.

— Lisa Fentress· Jun 10, 07:59