Bestigium / Mérida
Villa · 1 layer

La Fernandina: Roman farmstead and chamber tombs

A Roman rural settlement at the place called La Fernandina, in the south of the municipality of Mérida, recognisable from the building material scattered on the surface. Its notable feature is that five underground chamber tombs were found here — that is, built tombs of some substance, not simple graves.

Type
Villa
Preservation
Surface finds
Protection
Inventoried · Nivel B-24
Coordinates
38.88750, -6.33667
Photographs
0
The site

What it is and what is left

That detail matters: chamber burials associated with a rural establishment point to a group with the means to build itself a lasting funerary space beside its farm, a pattern well documented in the territory of Augusta Emerita, where villas usually have their family cemetery a short distance from the living quarters.

The site is inventoried by Jean-Gérard Gorges in his repertory of Hispano-Roman villas (Les villes hispano-romaines. Inventaire et problématique archéologique, Paris, 1979) and in the municipal archaeological survey. There is no published systematic excavation, so the plan of the settlement, its extent and its precise date remain undetermined. Location approximate.

The section

What each period left here

It reads downwards: each band is a period with fabric in this site, newest first, deepest last.

25 BC – 5th c. Level 1
0 facts
0 photographs
Roman

Roman

This site has fabric from this period. Mérida has 57 more sites built in the same layer.

See the whole layer →
Bottom of the section

Below the deepest layer of each site is the ground itself: what has not been excavated yet, or what left nothing built. The catalogue only claims what is documented.

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