Ground Floor

Over the last week and a half I have been excavating a small room in a bathhouse (maybe 5 feet by 8 feet).  At the start of the dig the very top of an arch was visible.  Since then we have been exposing the arch bit by bit, making our way deeper and deeper into the room.  And deeper and deeper. And deeper.  Our two man team of myself and Stefano, an older Italian workhorse, just kept digging.  Every time we thought we might be close to floor level, we were disappointed, as the walls kept stretching deeper and deeper into the soil.   

Stefano and I measuring the depth of our hole

All the way through we have encountered evidence of destruction, large limestone blocks that have fallen into the room from above, presumably during the major earthquake that destroyed much of the region in 749 AD.  Filling buckets or dirt, hauling out awkward stones – this was back breaking work.  It got even worse as we got deeper and deeper into the hole and had to find creative ways to get out, building up stairs of sand bags and then moving them to excavate under them.  The last couple days we have been required to wear hard hats, due to the depth. 

After all that, I’m glad to report that we have hit floor level.  The level of the room goes down over ten feet from top to bottom.  Considering that the upper portion of the room is not intact (currently the top ends at the keystone of the arch, but surely there were a couple courses higher) the full depth must have been 12 to 13 feet or more.  This is a very deep room.

It's hard to give a sense of sale with one picture, but notice where my head is compared to the top of the arch.  And I am standing on a large block that raises me up 18 inches.

Floor level is the best level for finds, since this is where things that fell into crack and crevices during daily use would have lodged. As you approach floor level you use hand trowels rather than pick axes and go through a couple centimeters at a time.  As we got close to floor level we found a burn layer and many animal bones, suggesting some cooking taking place in the room.  My partner also found a nice glass base for a goblet.  The dig director brought the metal detector and found a coin and two pieces of copper.  And there were lots of pottery pieces. 

A coin and a piece of bronze found by the dig director with a metal detector

Both bins are pieces of pottery found in our square yesterday - lots of pieces

But the highlight (for me), came when I discovered a coin myself, which is pretty surprising without a metal detactor, since this coin is about the size of a corn kernel and mixed with a bunch of dirt it’s hard to  distinguish.  I just thought it looked a little too round to be dirt and when I picked it up it felt heavy.  It’s impossible to tell what kind of coin it is, but it is amazing to hold it in your hand.  I also found a metal implement not much bigger than a large needle.  Someone suggested it may have been a cosmetic instrument.    

The coin I found.  I know it doesn't look like much, but it is pretty amazing

That’s the good news. We reached the floor and found cool stuff.  The bad news is that there are more questions than answers.  We think this may have been a service room for the bathhouse, near the furnace that would have heated the hot rooms of the bath.  But that is a guess based on location and size more than findings. 

The arch is perplexing.  The upper portion of the arch is built solidly of basalt stone (a dark, heavy volcanic rock), but as we got deeper the tidy structure gets sloppier.  Confusingly, some stones are missing, or replaced with soft limestone blocks (we may dig into this a bit more in the next couple days to see if we can figure out more).  The abutting wall also gets really sloppy at the lower level, no longer neatly flush, some stones are inset.  And the soil changes color about four feet from the floor, as if the lower portion was filled in before the upper portion and the shortened room (still 7+ feet high) was used secondarily, after the bathhouse was no longer in use, possibly as a residential space (explaining the animal bones we found mixed into this middle layer). 

There are also springers (the first stones just starting to form an arch) for another arch (that is not intact) at the other entryway of the room.  But these two archs are offset from each other.  This doesn’t seem to fit with the Romans interest in symmetry. 

There is stone flooring on about half the floor but the other half is just more soil.  So why is part paved and part not?  At the end of the day a giant hole was exposed under a wall at floor level that led into a cavity that opens up and goes back 10-15 feet.  After all these layers of fill it’s odd to have this open space.  The dig directors wonders if this is an earlier (Hellenistic) cistern for holding water.  It’s not clear whether this is manmade or natural, so we may look into this in the next couple days. 

The upper portion of the photo is the stone flooring.  The lower portion of the photo is where the flooring just turns to dirt.  We're not sure why.

A hole that was exposed under one of the walls that opens into a large cavity.  Maybe a Hellenistic cistern.

So we hit the floor level, but we still have a lot of questions about this space.  We’re running out of time to find answers, but we’ll see what the next couple days reveal.  Regardless, it has been an exciting process to be involved in firsthand.  I can’t believe how many pictures I have taken of this one room.