The Gabii Project is back!

If you are a friend of the Gabii Project, you will have seen from our facebook posts that a lot has been going on on site for the past four weeks! After a stint of preparatory work with staff only, a team of 40 students joined us on Monday June 29th for our seventh straight season of excavation at Gabii.

Despite the recent heat wave, activities in the three excavation sectors are progressing with the same enthusiasm ever since. The Area D group is completing the investigation of a cluster of Early Iron Age huts, whose stratified sequence is providing tantalizing new evidence on the earliest phases of city formation at Gabii. The Environmental Lab team is processing dozens of samples from these deposits, which will help us reconstruct the function of the structures, economic patterns, and ancient diet. In neighboring Area C, we reopened a trench first excavated in 2009-2012, which revealed a large atrium house. We are now exploring the Early Republican levels of the city-block, and we hope to reach into the same Archaic deposits attested in Area D. In Area F, three rooms of the monumental public building brought to light in the past two seasons remain to be documented. Once this will have been accomplished, we will have a complete picture of this exceptionally important building. Meanwhile, the Topo team is producing scores of photomodels (we are over 1000 now...). It is a busy time in the Finds Lab too, with washing pottery in the morning and sorting, drawing and studying the finds in the afternoon.

Several visitors and friends came to see the progress of the excavation, including Kim Bowes and Richard Hodges, Lisa Fentress, and David Potter, who gave a lecture on Epigraphy to our students. We were particularly pleased to welcome a group of children participating in the Summer Camp of the Children's Hospital of Padova.

Ciao for now!