Part 2: The Stratigraphy : Trenches in the Area of the Forum, and IX D North : Forum V : Phase VII: Agricultural Activity

There are a number of features and layers that, despite their failure to provide datable material, seem for stratigraphic or logical reasons to belong to a period after the phase of the huts and the reopening of the cistern. Most of the later features seem to be related to agricultural activity or the robbing of building material. In the front of the house, several very deep and large pits seem to have been intended for the planting of trees, probably olives. One of these pits cut deep through the mosaic floor in room C, while another cut through the disturbed pis» of the fauces and down through the backfill of its robbed doorsill. The latter cut seems to have failed as a planting pit, for it was subsequently filled entirely with very large stones in a soft brown soil matrix (149). Another planting pit may be represented by a circular cut in the agricultural disturbance in room J, filled by a soft brown soil containing no datable material (138). Other abortive attempts at tree planting may be represented by a cut in room P, filled with 166, and a cut in room L filled with broken pieces of the pavement that the pit had been dug through (183). As elsewhere, the lack of dating material makes it difficult to be more precise about the absolute chronology and function of these features. The removal of cut stone blocks for reuse is another feature of this period; such activity was identified along the back wall of the house, where the stones were large, well cut, and highly visible at ground level. There, the fills (225, 232, 238) of three separate robber trenches were identified.

A different sort of feature probably dates to a point after major cultivation had ceased but before the walls of the old house had completely subsided. This feature consisted of a rectangular hole (251) cut into the disturbed destruction layers of K in the northwest corner of the room, using the walls themselves as the northwest and southwest sides of the cut (pl. 63). The cut reached the floor of room K, where the blows struck by a digging tool are still visible in the signinum pavement. The northeast and southeast sides of the cut were lined with stone and column fragments, and a piece of tile was placed at the angle of the walls. Into the cut was laid a body (see burial catalogue for skeletal analysis). The head rested on the piece of tile and the arms were extended along the sides, hands resting on the pelvis. The grave was filled back in with a clean brown-gray earth (252), and the head and foot of the grave were marked by architectural fragments. The head, a worn, low column capital, probably came from one of the columns of the loggia; the foot, a fragment of marble frieze depicting a sacrificial procession, could have been part of an Augustan altar reused in the Julio-Claudian garden. The only pieces of evidence for the date of this grave are the fact that it was dug into an area of previous agricultural disturbance and the assumption that its precise location in the corner of the room indicates that it was dug at a time when the house walls were still visible. The fill was almost perversely devoid of even the smallest piece of dating material.

The last stage in the medieval phase of activity is represented by several layers in the south corner of the house, where the remains of floors and walls were closest to the surface. Like most of the previous activity, these layers seem to be related to cultivation. In this case, however, the disturbance of collapse levels is much more violent and pays no attention to the lines of walls. Both characteristics suggest shallow but thorough plowing at a time when the original plan of the house no longer appeared above ground level. This sort of activity was identified in room O (131, 158), corridor M (157), and room P (also 157, 283). An area of somewhat broken pis» collapse in the east part of room N (343) may also be a product of this phase. All these layers, along with the rest of the upper part of the stratigraphy of the house, were covered by a layer of brown, moderately rocky soil (7/222; 133 in K) that extended over the entire area of excavation and represented the abandonment of the site during the later middle ages and early modern period.

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