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Ordinary Meeting lecture in conjunction with the Roman Society by Dr Nicola Terrenato
The debate on the early phases of the Roman Forum goes back to the origins of urban archaeology in Rome, in the days of Giacomo Boni’s excavations in the early 1900s. Understanding how and when the first piazza was created has always—and rightly—be considered as a crucial step to reconstruct the urban formation in Rome and in central Italy more generally. Lacking palaces and large temples, the beginning of early Italian urbanism can be detected primarily from the creation of public spaces in the center of the settlement, like the Forum in Rome.
Since the 1990s, the dominant theory for Rome has envisioned that the Forum valley had always been seasonally flooded, thus requiring mitigation to be turned into a public piazza. Such mitigation would have happened between the 8th and the 7th century and would have required thousands of cubic meters of intentional infill. This massive project would have marked the first major collective effort on the part of the early Romans to turn their settlement into a city. Recent hydrogeological data from a vast borehole survey in the neighboring Forum Boarium (and other adjoining valleys), however, has been calling into question the accepted reconstruction. After a careful and methodologically innovative work to create a three-dimensional model of the entire stratigraphy, a starkly different new picture is coming into focus.
We now know that the environment of early Roman valleys changed radically in the course of the 6th century BCE, probably as a result of human impacts along the broader river basin. Over the course of only a few decades, meters of sediment were deposited, the Tiber riverbed moved and was raised, and the Tiberine island emerged for the first time. The earliest Forum gravel floors lie on top of this sequence, providing a much later date for the creation of the first piazza than previously believed. This re-dating of the Roman Forum has major implication for our understanding of early urbanism in central Italy. Evidence from other sites converges to show that budding cities in this region invested in public spaces only at a fairly advanced stage of their development, centuries after their first occupation.
Nicola Terrenato is the Esther B. Van Deman Collegiate Professor of Roman Studies and the director of the Kelsey Museum at the University of Michigan. He directs the Gabii Project and the Sant’Omobono Project, and conducts research in the Forum Boarium, at the Regia and on the Quirinal in Rome. His research focuses on early Rome, the Roman conquest and the formation of states and empires. He recently published Early Roman Expansion, CUP 2019, which won the 2021 AIA Wiseman Book Award.
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