Work at Gabii in 2007 and 2008 has concentrated on a survey of the former urban area within the line of the ancient city walls. Today the site of Gabii, contained within the
Parco Archeologico di Gabii, is abandoned, as it has been for many centuries at this point. The site is largely given over to tall grasses and vegetation, making for extremely favorable survey conditions. Our project adopted a survey strategy that included the use both of magnetometry and core-sampling, both manual and mechanical. The former method of course aims at the detection of sub-surface features, particularly architecture, while the latter method was employed in order to help gauge the stratigraphic depth of the site along certain axes, thus creating a stratigraphic profile. Surprisingly, no integrated site-plan of Gabii exists, and this constitutes a prime objective for the Project at this stage.
The magnetometry survey was carried out by our colleagues from
The British School at Rome, led by
Stephen Kay. Beginning in summer 2007, the magnetometry survey will continue into autumn 2008 by which time at least some 30 ha of the site will have been surveyed. The preliminary results of the survey by the BSR team suggest an interesting urban layout with numerous features of interest preserved beneath the soil. As the team now filters the data this information will prove extremely useful in the development of an excavation strategy.
The other prong of our survey approach has been
the use of core-sampling with manual augurs. Working along two principal axes imposed on the site, this approach yielded a great deal of information about the stratigraphic sequence at Gabii. The sampling was conducted within the already delimited archaeological area and also to the south of the modern via Prenestina on private property that is now used as a landing strip for ultra-light aircraft. Throughout the core-sampling the team carefully collected data on the preservation of archaeological layers and also sought to understand the geological profile of the site to the extent possible; in other words, to determine where the anthropic layers (man-made) ended so as to assess the stratigraphic depth of the preserved deposits at Gabii. To this point the results of this second arm of the survey look to be promising. In 2008 the core-sampling team was composed of Marcello Mogetta, Jason Farr, Elizabeth Robinson, Carlo Virili, and Jeffrey Becker.
Taken together, data from magnetometry and core-sampling will provide great help in further pursuing the archaeology of this important ancient city.
As we near the end of survey operations at Gabii, on the basis of data collected from manual core sampling this summer, we elected to carry out several mechanical bore holes in order to sample a larger range of stratigraphiic deposits and, hopefully, ascertain the depth of the bedrock for several loci on the site. The positioning of the mechanical bore holes was determined on the basis of manual samples that showed promise in terms of preserved stratigraphy and/or anthropic inclusions. By distributing the coverage of these mechanical samples across t
he intramural area of Gabii, we hope to be able to ascertain something of an idea about the nature of the archaeological deposits in various areas of interest. Once the data from both sets of bore holes has been compiled, we will be able to construct a site profile for Gabii and thus be better able to target the placement of our first trenches in 2009.
