Portal de Caravaca de la Cruz
www.portaldecaravaca.com
The excavation carried out by the Archaeological Museum 'La Soledad' and financed by the Department of Culture reaffirms the importance of this territory in one of the great war episodes of antiquity;
the war that faced the sons of Pompey the Great with Julius Caesar
The new archaeological campaign developed over three weeks by the Municipal Archaeological Museum of 'La Soledad', under the direction of the municipal archaeologist Francisco Brotóns Yagüe, has completed the excavation in one of the great departments of the Roman military tower that was built , in the middle of the 1st century BC, on the occasion of the civil war that pitted the sons of Pompey the Great against Julius Caesar.
During the development of the field works, paid for by the Department of Culture of the City of Caravaca de la Cruz, has counted with the intervention of four specialists pawns and the co-direction of archaeologist Antonio Javier Murcia Muñoz.
The tower of 'La Cabezuela' was part of a network of castles built on purpose during the aforementioned military conflict to facilitate the movement of troops and ensure supplies between the port of Carthago Nova (Cartagena) and the high Andalusia.
Both this tower and the Roman castle of the Cerro de las Fuentes de Archivel constitute the only two Hispanic fortresses that, until now, could have been directly linked to the great military conflict at the end of the Roman Republic from the archaeological excavations that the Museum of 'La Soledad' has taken place in the last two decades.
The intervention that has just concluded has focused on the complete excavation of one of these spaces.
From the work carried out it has been possible to observe a compartmentalization of the houses in a large sector of the room and a smaller one destined to store food.
These are very sober rooms, as is usual in military structures, with simple mud floors, which were built with adobe walls and roofed with branches and clay.
In the interior have been found numerous ceramic fragments of kitchen, table and storage dishes, which correspond to productions from very different places of the Mediterranean basin;
In the same way, different utensils and tools related to the daily activities of the soldiers were located.
"All this will undoubtedly contribute to a much better understanding of the role played by its occupants in a conflict that, in just four years, has affected all the coastal areas of the Mediterranean," explained Brotons.
Similarly, it underlines "the geostrategic importance of the Caravaca basin in one of the greatest war episodes of antiquity, which makes the small nuclei of Archivel and Barranda already occupy an important place in archeology and military history Roman of the Iberian Peninsula ".
The structure of 'La Cabezuela' is a clear example of a watchtower and control of the immediate territory that sits on the top of a hill with a conical shape, a circular base, steep slopes and a raised summit about fifty meters above the level of the most immediate environment.
It has dimensions of 26 by 34 meters and an approximate surface of 860 square meters.
Inside, the rooms are divided into two bays separated by a corridor or a central courtyard;
These are very long rooms, about 10 by 3 meters, which served as homes and as warehouse spaces.
The open-air musealization, thanks to numerous excavation and valorisation campaigns of the last years, both in La Cabezuela and in the Cerro de las Fuentes de Archivel, guarantees the free access of all citizens to a cultural heritage that has been become an important factor of tourist dynamism of the high districts of Caravaca de la Cruz.
Source: Ayuntamiento de Caravaca de la Cruz
Privacy policy
- Legal notice
- Cookies