Republican Temple Podia buried underneath a Portico?: Attempting to re-interpret Finelli’s 1913-Excavations based on archive studies, georadar surveys, and new excavations in the Northeast of Ostia’s Forum
- Autores: Axel Gering
- Localización: Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Antiquité, ISSN 0223-5102, Vol. 136, Nº. 1, 2024 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Studi su Ostia e Portus: Settimo seminario Ostiense), págs. 7-36
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
In 1913, Raffaele Finelli began to excavate an area at the intersection of Cardo and Decumanus in Ostia antica. During this excavation in the centre of the castrum, Rome’s first fortified settlement on the coast, important finds and structures were brought to light. Unfortunately, these excavations were never completed or adequately published due to the early death of the excavation director Dante Vaglieri, resulting only in a modest reception in the scientific community. Since 2016, almost 100 years after its first excavation, the focus of the Ostia Forum Projekt (OFP) lies on this general area: A series of georadar surveys, archive studies, and excavations were conducted, uncovering a previously unknown sacred area, the TFR-Sanctuary. In this paper, the tufa and concrete structures which were unearthed during the 1913-excavations are revisited: Due to additional information from the georadar surveys, the analysis of the old excavation diaries and photos, and new excavation data, these structures can now be localised precisely to their full extent. As a consequence, a reinterpretation of the structures’ function as temple podia is proposed.
