A New Plan for an Ancient Italian City: Gabii Revealed

Becker, Jeffrey A.; Mogetta, Marcello; Terrenato, Nicola

doi:10.3764/aja.113.4.629

Cited by 27 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Since Gabii eventually came under the power of Rome-first as a member of the Latin League and later as a town with municipal status-numerous important intersections exist between the two cities. The Gabii Project is an ongoing, international archeological initiative (Becker et al, 2009;Mogetta and Becker, 2014) aimed not only at exploring and understanding the archeology of the city of Gabii but also situating and contextualizing its role in the wider orbits of central Italy and the Roman Empire. In this context, the exploitation and employment of the local building stone (Lapis Gabinus) in several important monuments in Rome beginning in the second century BCE represents a significant development.…”

Section: The Archeological Site Of Gabiimentioning

confidence: 99%

Geochemical identification criteria for “peperino” stones employed in ancient Roman buildings: A Lapis Gabinus case study

Farr

Marra

Terrenato

2015

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports

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Lapis Gabinus is a durable volcanic stone originally exploited and employed in construction at the ancient Latin city of Gabii. From the second century BCE it was also exported to Rome, where it appears in a series of important monuments, including the Tabularium and the Forum of Augustus. It is a lithified hydromagmatic-surge deposit erupted about 285,000 years ago by the Castiglione Crater, 20 km east of Rome, and is similar in appearance to other local rocks that geologists and archeologists often call "peperino". In the present study we establish geochemical identification criteria to classify this rock and distinguish it from the other "peperini" employed by Roman builders. To this end, we have performed trace-element analyses on 17 samples of Lapis Gabinus collected from outcrops at Gabii, and on 11 samples representative of the other "peperino" stones occurring in the area of Rome. The resulting reference dataset has been employed to construct discrimination diagrams in which the geochemical compositional fields of the different rocks are defined. We then tested this identification method by plotting in these diagrams the trace-element compositions of 16 archeological samples of "peperino" stones collected from the buildings of ancient Gabii and Rome, spanning the sixth century BCE through the first century CE. Our results show that the three most common such stones (Lapis Gabinus, Lapis Albanus, Tufo del Palatino) have distinct trace-element compositions and can be readily distinguished using the proposed discrimination diagrams. This relatively simple and inexpensive identification method can be successfully extended to other archeological research on volcanic materials and employed for wider petrographic purposes.

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Section: The Archeological Site Of Gabiimentioning

confidence: 99%

Geochemical identification criteria for “peperino” stones employed in ancient Roman buildings: A Lapis Gabinus case study

Farr

Marra

Terrenato

2015

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports

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“…These archeological contexts were recently discovered during civil projects in Rome's current city center. The exception is the San Primitivo church cemetery, which is located in the ancient city of Gabii, close to the lake of Castiglione, 20 km east of Rome (Becker et al 2009;Mogetta and Becker 2014) (Table 1) (Fig. 1).…”

Section: Archeological Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It became densely populated during the Republican period (sixth century BCE-first century CE), when it established political, social, and economic legacies with Rome (Becker et al 2009;Mogetta and Becker 2014). Then, the Imperial Age was marked by a drop in population size until the town was progressively abandoned in the early medieval period (sixth-ninth centuries CE) (Becker et al 2009), when the land was given over to agricultural production (Quilici 1977;Zapelloni Pavia et al 2017). This study analyzed the medieval burials dated to tenth and eleventh centuries CE and located in a cemetery close to San Primitivo church.…”

Section: Archeological Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The edge of the Empire: diet characterization of medieval Rome through stable isotope analysis

Varano

Angelis

Battistini

et al. 2020

Archaeol Anthropol Sci

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This paper aims to define the dietary profile of the population of early medieval Rome (fifth-eleventh centuries CE) by carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis. This period was characterized by deep changes in the city's economic, demographic, and social patterns, probably affecting its inhabitants' nutritional habits. Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis of bone collagen was used to detect the nutritional profile of 110 humans from six communities inhabiting the city center of Rome and one from the ancient city of Gabii. Thirteen faunal remains were also analyzed to define the ecological baseline of the medieval communities. The isotopic results are consistent with a diet mainly based on the exploitation of C 3 plant resources and terrestrial fauna, while the consumption of aquatic resources was detected only among the San Pancrazio population. Animal protein intake proved to be similar both among and within the communities, supporting a qualitatively homogenous dietary landscape in medieval Rome. The comparison with isotopic data from the Imperial Age allowed us to detect a diachronic nutritional transition in ancient Rome, in which the collapse of the Empire, and in particular the crisis of economic power and the trade system, represented a tipping point for its population's nutritional habits.

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“…The newly published Mezzano core (Sadori 2018) was also affected by local settlement activity but was "off-site" in the Etruscan period, illustrating the complexity of vegetational development in the landscape (see further discussion below). In the south, the Alban hills contained both the volcanic lakes of Nemi and Albano (Mercuri et al 2002) and nucleated Latin sites, such as Alba Longa, Tusculum and Gabii (Guaitoli 1982;Becker et al 2009). The proximity of such sites to pollen cores allows us to capture not only the general picture of the landscape, but also some of the details of variation in clearance of vegetation in the neighbourhood of concentrations of population.…”

Section: Scalar Data Source Criticismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tyrrhenian central Italy: Holocene population and landscape ecology

et al. 2019

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This paper compares changes in vegetation structure and composition (using synthetic fossil pollen data) with proxy data for population levels (including settlements and radiocarbon dates) over the course of the last ten millennia in Tyrrhenian central Italy. These data show generalised patterns of clearance of woodland in response both to early agriculturalists and urbanism, as well as the specific adoption of tree crops and variations in stock grazing. The results provide a comprehensive understanding of the development of the

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A New Plan for an Ancient Italian City: Gabii Revealed

Cited by 27 publications

References 11 publications

Geochemical identification criteria for “peperino” stones employed in ancient Roman buildings: A Lapis Gabinus case study

Geochemical identification criteria for “peperino” stones employed in ancient Roman buildings: A Lapis Gabinus case study

The edge of the Empire: diet characterization of medieval Rome through stable isotope analysis

Tyrrhenian central Italy: Holocene population and landscape ecology

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