Author: Alessandro Sebastiani

The third week started with three graduate students (Alex, Elena, and Mari) from Michigan State University joining our excavation team, together with Prof. Todd Fenton. The work focused on three main different areas.

The room, that has been excavated in the last days, has revealed to be an open area in antiquity, constantly used as a dumping space to level up the walking surface. We almost reached the end of the ancient sequence of occupation and the last context (41) had a number of interesting materials, including a black gloss ware vessel with an unknown stamp at its base.

More work was needed in the western part of the excavation area, where we removed context 36 and started to fully expose a black, burnt context that we discovered also last year.

In the area of the main drain, we almost finished exposing the side wall on the eastern side and the filling of the structure itself.

The excavation continued in the area of the eastern room, where we removed context 40. This stratum contained a large number of pottery fragments and some loom weights, although it is possible to consider it as an abandonment layer. Its removal brought to the light a new clay context, that we will investigate on Monday.

On the southern part of the excavation trench, we have cleaned the wall tops of the drain, exposing its cover in cementicium while we also aimed to finalize the cleaning of the SE corner, where a context of slag and rubbles seems to have been used as a walking surface.

Context 10 was harder than we thought and the vegetation did not help. We almost completed the removal of this layer and in some part of the excavation area, we are beginning to see the emerging of a new context, composed by a light yellowish brown ground and fragmented tiles.

Rain and thunders have prevented us to completely expose this new context, possibly the roof collapse, leaving it for Monday morning.

Another exciting day at Castellaraccio today. While a part of the team was completing the plan of the castle with the help of the total station, the rest of us worked in the test pit opened in Area 1. We begin to see a context that is probably still part of the collapsing of the building, but much more compact and with fewer stones and has been labeled as context 10.

After the documentation, we started the removal of this layer, hoping to find the level of abandonment of this area of the castle, finally free from the collapse.

Today we concentrated our efforts on finishing the removal of context 35. The stratum covered the first real abandonment layer of the room (context 40) that we started to remove soon after the documentation. The abandonment is characterized by a clay matrix soil, rich in charcoal and material culture. At the same time, we continued the cleaning and exposure of the side walls of the main drain running at the center of the excavation area.

After the hard work of the last two days, this afternoon at Castellaraccio di Monteverdi was mostly focused on cleaning the curtain wall 3 for taking a picture of it and working in our new excavation area in the North West corner of Area 1.

The results of this day are promising, since we may have found the first context under the collapse of the building or at least an interface.

 

The IMPERO Team had an appreciated helping hand at Podere Cannicci this morning when the machine came to clear both our steadily growing spoil heaps and the dark brown soil covering Context 36. With the aid of this machine, the entirety of the team managed to level out the context and further expose the almost-black soil beneath. There is still brown soil to be troweled away, but the team made great strides today in leveling out the context, and we even found the tissue laid by the original site excavators from the 1980s and 90s to protect and mark the level that they reached.

On the other side of the trench, part of our team continued to pickaxe and scrape away Context 35, seeking a new, yellowish soil underneath. Context 35 proved to be deeper and less even than expected, but after the great perseverance of our members, the streaks of yellowish-gold soil gave way to several patches of the new context to be properly exposed tomorrow.

On the home front, two more students stayed with our pottery specialist, Massimo, this afternoon, and further expanded their understanding of fragment treatment and identification under his guidance. Tomorrow morning heralds a great deal of work, but the IMPERO Team is prepared for all of the hard work and wonderful discovery awaiting us at Podere Cannicci!

New day, the same castle. After an exciting morning in Podere Cannicci we all moved back to the Castle of Monteverdi after lunch.

After the hard work of all the team now the western part of Area 1 is relatively free from rubble and roots. In the northern part of the excavation area, we began to expose what seems to be the first stratum under the collapse which butts up to the wall 5. We defined a smaller trench, where tomorrow we will test the depth of the remaining collapse.

The entire team banded together again this morning to continue our work at Podere Cannicci. Half of the original Roman site excavators continued their effort on Context 35, leveling out the soil to the depth exposed last week and evening out the borders of the context. Behind them, part of the team continued to reveal the newly uncovered wall toward the back of the site and also discovered the continuation of the trench found in 2017, the stones of which seem to have collapsed inward. The new workers from Castellaraccio at Podere Cannicci likewise furthered their helpful labor—troweling to clean stones and pickaxing the much shallower Context 1.

While the rest of the team worked, our first students, Ryan Poloncarz and Rebecca Gilliland, joined our pottery specialist Massimo to clean all of the collected pottery fragments from the Roman site. They found the experience incredibly rewarding due to Massimo’s magnificent expertise, and the success of this first students-expert collaboration beyond the site has us fondly anticipating the rest of our students’ experiences with Massimo.

This morning, the IMPERO Project team returned to work from a weekend of beautiful adventure tasting wine and exploring the Abbey of Sant’Antimo at Montalcino. Even though we had two full days away from the labor of excavation, our archaeologists had a strong start at both Podere Cannicci and Castellaraccio. As our team leaders announced on Friday, we combined the previously separated groups working on both sites to better optimize our efforts—in the morning, the Castellaccio segment of the team joined with the one formerly working alone at Podere Cannicci, and after lunch, the people focused on Podere Cannicci joined with those at Castellaccio to work on the castle.

For such a significant reorganization, the teams united seamlessly and gave their all to their new positions. At Podere Cannicci, the new team members began to uncover a previously set aside segment of the site, and the original crew continued to uncover the two contexts (35 and 36) and wall features exposed last week.

Moreover, our pottery specialist Massimo Brando has joined the team and has started to provide a number of information about chronologies of the newly discovered contexts. In the coming days, we will post some data coming from the pottery analysis and its related typologies.

Although there is a great deal of work still left at both sites, we are extremely proud of the adaptability of our team as a whole and how well and passionately we all came together at the start of this new week. We eagerly await what breakthroughs our incredible students and team leaders make over the course of this week!