Via Gabina

Place Description

For six and a half weeks each summer from 1976 through 1989 Philip Oliver-Smith and Walter Widrig (both of Rice University) excavated, often to bedrock, two sites fourteen kilometers east of the center of ancient Rome. The team worked from a surface survey conducted by John Ward Perkins and Anne Kahane in 1964, which traced the path of the via Gabina, a road joining Rome and Gabii and supplanted in the 1st century BCE by the more up-to-date via Praeneste (today the via Praenestina-Fig.1). This same survey established by the collection of surface material thirty-five occupation sites bordering the via Gabina. From these sites we selected three for further investigation, two of which were fully uncovered to reveal the remains of two suburban villas and a late Roman horreum or giant barn. For recording purposes we kept the site designations of Ward Perkins and Kahane. Therefore the discussion here will refer to the villas at Site 10 and Site 11. In 1976, our first season, two trial trenches located structures at Site 13 (another villa?), but no further digging was done here because of problems involving crop rotation (our work was carried out on the land of a still existing farm), time, and money.

Bibliography

• Walter Widrig papers on the excavation of Via Gabina Villas, Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. https://txarchives.org/ricewrc/finding_aids/00310.xml

Places

• Via Gabina villas (Pleiades:42248665)