Repopulating Late Antique Gabii: Two Seasons of the "Gabii Legacy Data Project" (20 min)

Presenters

Marilyn Evans, Kalamazoo College; Laura Banducci, Carleton University; and Parrish Wright, University of South Carolina

Abstract

Excavations undertaken by the Gabii Project (2009–present) in the ancient Latin city of Gabii, Italy, have shed light on a substantial portion of the city's history from the Iron Age to the Imperial period. In 2020, a new initiative, the "Gabii Legacy Data Project," was launched to study and publish records and artifacts from excavations by the Italian State in the 1990s in an adjacent sector of the so-called area urbana. Understanding the sequence recovered in these earlier excavations is critical to our research on the trajectory of the Roman city and advances the ethical investigation of the site by publishing what has been found.

Archaeologists in recent decades have explored the possibilities for integrating legacy and modern archaeological data. This paper presents our approaches to and preliminary results of marrying historical records, mainly comprised of photographs, journals, and maps, with contemporary data, including Harris matrices, 3D models, GIS maps, and digital open-access databases. Two seasons of study have allowed us to reconstruct the stratigraphic sequence of the old excavations, which can now be connected with that from the Gabii Project excavations.

The study of artifacts in storage has also produced new surprises. There is a considerable amount of pottery spanning the Imperial period, with particularly rich deposits from what was likely a major period of infilling in the early 5th century C.E. These data, when contextualized with the results of the Gabii Project, are furthering our understanding of a "missing chronology" in Gabii’s later history. This was a time when structures surrounding an incipient forum were divided into smaller spaces as the nature of the city changed. Together, these data have the potential to tell a more complete story about the behaviors of the Gabines during a key period of urban transformation.

  AIA-8C