Rome at Its Core: Reconstructing the Environment and Topography of the Forum Boarium

This dissertation presents the results of a recent geoarchaeological investigation in the heart of Rome. Using an interdisciplinary approach with underutilized methodologies, namely coring survey and environmental sampling, I have been able to investigate deeply buried levels in Rome’s river valley, called the Forum Boarium. This region marks the site of Rome’s original river harbor and an important crossroad in prehistoric central Italy. By drilling a series of cores that produce sediment boreholes more than 15m long, it becomes possible to survey previously inaccessible archaeological and geological stratigraphy across a wide area and with great depth. As coring survey effectively explores the interactions and relationships of past peoples with their landscape, utilization and refinement of these techniques will help launch promising new research in the field of environmental history. In the case of Rome, environmental archaeology offers new perspective on the nascent city by providing data on the pre-urban environment and urban development of Rome’s river valley. Among other things, my survey exposed key features of the natural landscape in the Forum Boarium, including the location of Rome’s original river harbor and the nearby section of raised floodplain at the base of the Capitoline Hill. I argue that Rome’s origins as a harbor settlement helped the city achieve regional dominance from its inception. Moreover, I posit that the exponential growth of trade between Etruria and Greece in the seventh century BCE created new opportunities, which motivated the early inhabitants of Rome to begin engaging in large scale building and landscape modification projects, aimed at building a cohesive city that could also be protected from nuisance flooding. The substantial dataset produced by coring survey and environmental sampling provides an empirically-driven timeline for Rome’s urbanization process, corroborating a rich archaeological and literary record that signals sixth century Rome as transformative and exceptional. The available paleoenvironmental evidence suggests that the Tiber riverine system was relatively stable during the early centuries of human habitation at the site of Rome, but sometime after the early sixth century the Tiber began a process of rapid aggradation. Between 580 and 480 BCE, 5.8m of sediment was deposited in the Forum Boarium. This sedimentation rate represents a significant hydrological shift in the Tiber basin well beyond the norm of nuisance flooding, which I argue is a direct consequence of the Romans’ prolific urban activities on the local landscape. I introduce evidence for dredging in the Forum Boarium as early as the fifth century BCE as one of a variety of flood-mitigating activities pursued in Rome. In sum, this project shows how environmental pressures not only shaped the physical landscape of the early city, but also emergent socio-political institutions, as the Romans were compelled to adapt to their volatile river in order to protect important ritual and commercial pursuits in the Forum Boarium valley.PhDClassical Art & ArchaeologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138718/1/albrock_1.pd