Research team: Katie Huntley (Boise State), Alessandro Querica (Soprintendenza Archaeologia del Piemonte), Professor Penelope Allison (Leicester University) and Melania Cazzulo (assistant field director)
A group of researchers and students headed by Katie Huntley, assistant professor of ancient history and archaeology at Boise State University, will work this summer to establish excavation of the Roman settlement of Libarna, Italy.
The Boise State contingent will include up to six student volunteers, including current history majors and a graduate who previously worked with Huntley in Pompeii, Italy.
The project, expected to spread over at least five summers, is a joint endeavor with Texas Tech University and England’s Leicester University. Researchers will study the cultural and economic development of the town originally settled during the Iron Age by the Liguri people of Northwest Italy and later colonized by the Romans in the third century BCE.
“Most of what we know about Roman towns comes from studying sites in central and southern Italy like Pompeii, Ostia and Cosa, so we know much less about northern cities,” said Huntley. “Moreover, Northwest Italy is really interesting because it was culturally Gallic in ancient times. So we want to see what effect the cultural interaction between the colonists and the indigenous peoples had on the life and economy of Libarna.”
Previous excavations at the site, conducted primarily in the 1930s and 1950s, uncovered public buildings including a theater, bath complex, forum, amphitheater and urban blocks. Huntley hopes to uncover an unexplored private, domestic area of the city.
This project will utilize geophysical survey techniques to map much of the site, including ground penetrating radar (GPR) and resistivity. These techniques allow researchers to map subsurface features, structures and patterns without disturbing the site. While acknowledging that excavation is important, Huntley also knows that it is a destructive process.
“We want to gather as much information as we can before we start to dig,” she said. “GPR uses electromagnetic pulses directed into the ground to detect these things. Resistivity detects electrical resistance in the ground. Using these two geophysical methods in conjunction will give us more dynamic data.”
The group also will use a drone to conduct digital elevation mapping (DEM). Because a large portion of the site is on privately owned lands that are under cultivation, the drone will allow them to gather information, with landowners’ permission, without having to worry about which fields are planted.
Information collected will help create a more accurate and dynamic map of the archaeological site to determine where to begin excavations in summer 2017.
BY: KATHLEEN TUCK PUBLISHED 11:04 AM / JUNE 22, 2016