Week I

On the site of Gabii roughly forty volunteers and forty staff members annually combine their efforts into uncovering and analyzing stratigraphy and the materials produced from excavation.

Last year, I volunteered for a Latial area of Gabii whose small stratigraphic units (SUs) were differentiated by slight changes in color, composition, and compaction. Identifying SUs delicate were of the utmost importance and we were instructed to save every potsherd the size of our thumbnails, or larger. Aside from a few extreme cases, all of the pottery we uncovered was impasto, hand-built, low-fired vessels with thick walls, and most of it barely made the threshold of "thumbnail-sized". Under the expertise of Dr. Marilyn Evans, our team was able to sieve and take soil samples* of every stratigraphic unit. At the end of last season, we hit a sterile layer of bedrock thereby putting the area to rest from further excavation.

This year, my area of excavation could not be more different. After the backhoes had removed much of the topsoil resulting from contemporary plowing activities, we could already see walls constructed of stone and mortar. We reached the limits of the area's second SU from more than a day's worth of pickaxing and shoveling!

Erica Canavan picking away the layer of topsoil.

In soil, we found all sorts of tile and red, thin pottery sherds that could have been highly important if deposited about 1,200 years earlier in my previous area. Poignantly put, digging in the Late Imperial Era after a pre-Iron Age settlement is an entirely different kind of archaeology. Although our finds matter, there is quite literally so much anthropological material coming from our SU, as a team we could not hope to excavate the entire thing in five weeks with the same methodology as I used last year.

Upon brushing the walls, we discovered that two of the walls were constructed in a later phase than the initial boundary. The new wall alignment was crooked and appeared to be a slipshod building style in comparison to its neat counterparts. Perhaps the building materials were a poorer quality as the later phase walls hardly resisted the modern farming activities.

Darcy Tuttle tossing soil in front of the two stone steps.

The deeper we excavated, the more enigmatic this room became; six inches of the walls were exposed without an exit or entrance in sight. Could ghosts have built this room? After troweling against the walls, I noticed a change in soil compaction which turned out to be a large flat rock parallel to the soil surface. Upon further investigation, we had discovered our first stone step! The second was discovered below it shortly after, but we had to wrap up the week before finding a proper floor surface. As of this moment, only one thing is confirmed: much like their modern counterparts, the Ancient Gabiines could not walk through walls. Stay tuned to see if we uncover a full flight of stairs or other fascinating building techniques!

*At Gabii, soil sampling consists of pouring a given amount of soil into a strainer submerged in flowing water. The strainer catches pottery, rocks, bones, and other larger items while seeds, charcoal, and small items are skimmed from the top into a fine strainer. The silt sinks to the bottom, thus separating dirt from anthropological materials.

Photos courtesy of the Gabii Project Media Coordinator.