Under the tools of archaeologists, the laborious revelation is a form of miracle, a moment of exaltation, the bringing to light of beauties and lives long ignored. But it is not an end in itself, the beginning of another work, in the shadows after the light has suddenly fallen on the objects. Time for analysis, explanation, reinventing a scene with almost nothing, building a story and then preserving the remains. Post-excavation is an unknown universe of archaeology. Example with ancient Nîmes and the discoveries of Inrap presented this Wednesday, September 28.
On the tables and in the shelves, on pallets or carefully bagged, labeled in the same way, stones, bones, wood, earth to be sifted, relief of tombs or flint, incomplete skeletons and ceramics line up half-invisible in large gray bins in regular stacks. The heterogeneous sum of the past months of excavations by the sixty archaeologists of the Inrap Research Center in Nîmes.
[✨ #Actu] In Nîmes, Inrap is excavating a peripheral sector of the ancient city. Funerary structures yielded burial tombs, secondary cremation deposits, pyres, as well as a very varied furniture.
Learn more? https://t.co/WceJlqJRwq pic.twitter.com/p1LKcacJas
— Inrap (@Inrap) September 28, 2022
Days on your knees, paintbrush in hand, scalpel by your side, with a searching eye. Objects, traces, voids and solids that have or will speak, as they come out of this excavation, 1 rue de l’Abattoir, in Nîmes. Close, but actually simple starting point.
1 – The dead is like a guest at the banquet
At the corner of the current boulevard Jean-Jaurès and “50 m from the ancient rampart” at the Upper Empire, notes Marie Rochette, research engineer, the plot investigated from April to June revealed a “burial area and cultivated spaces until the Middle Ages”. This part of the Roman city is poorly known, few excavations have been conducted there. Obviously, vines were cultivated there in the 1st century and buried their dead.
One of the skeletons discovered at the rue de l’Abattoir site.
“There are fifty graves”, counts Marie Rochette. A group of three tombs, “three different funeral gestures”notes Julie Grimaud, who led the fieldwork, and a “burial chamber nearly 3 m long”where the deceased was laid “in banquet position”, she describes, intrigue archaeologists. It is now that they will phosphorus.
2 – Post-excavation or the time of analysis
“The post-excavationexplains Jean-Yves Breuil, Deputy Scientific Director of Inrap Méditerranée, it is all this time of analyzes that build the history of the place. Sometimes a very long timerequired for cleaning, packaging of objects, additional studies “stones, metals or DNA”bibliographic analyses, comparison of interpretations, issuing of hypotheses “until establishing the best possible scenario, says Jean-Yves Breuil. By providing evidence like all good investigators.
The small containers contained food buried with the deceased, the large urn many bones.
Why are the bodies of the three graves not buried in the same orientation, why is this one face down? And these long nails in this decidedly very large cavity. And this upright body, how did it hold up? “We are on something very special”breathes Julie Grimaud. “Seen already but not in southern Gaul”observes Marie Rochette. “There is a real staging of a guy at the banquetcomments Jean-Yves Breuil. Maybe a party animal?he jokes.
Nothing is known of him except these observations, we will seek.
3 – Specialists to the rescue
The skeleton has been washed, the anthropological study begins, dental and measuring instruments in hand for the anthropologist. “Sex, state of health, age at death, list Marie Rochette. We will determine the identity of the dead.” and even if there is nothing “we will restore what is missing”, assures his colleague. His DNA will tell his parentage and his teeth his diet, his posture, the cushion that held him, the way the earth insinuated itself if a fabric covered the body.
Among the pieces unearthed in the graves, a fragment of a stele.
The nails and the size of the pit sketch not a coffin but “something heavy, very big”maybe “a funeral bed that has been carried so far”thinks Julie Grimaud, just as the archaeologists brought back to the laboratory everything that was transportable.
Many lamps were discovered, often in an excellent state of preservation.
“It’s easier”, to empty this glass urn filled with the skeleton of a dead person and bring in an “armada of specialists” for support. The geomorphologist will restore the landscape; the ceramist will date the pottery and therefore the scene, when the specialist in epigraphy will decipher the stele, the archaeozoologist the traces of fauna – a snail shell is enough to define the vegetation – and another will read the mineral imprints in the ground left behind by agricultural crops. “We are going to study the remains of wood, the seeds…”don’t throw away any more, don’t throw anything away!
4 – Newcomers and old ways
Archeology has become the reconstitution of a complete, “environmental and human” history, insists Jean-Yves Breuil. By becoming preventive, it has made archaeologists versatile, able to forge links with other sciences. Veterinarians, doctors or geologists have themselves become archaeologists. But things don’t change.
The excavation took place 50 m from the old ancient rampart, a hundred from the Porte du Cadereau.
“We are looking for other examples”explains Marie Rochette, in books, in reference collections – of bones for example. “We manipulate a lot”says Marie Grimaud. “We work by repeating information. It allows us to go further, provides answers and opens up other, ever finer questions”concludes the boss.
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