Horta da Torre roman villa and the monumentalization in Lusitania’s rural landscape

Abstract

Ongoing excavations since 2012 in Horta da Torre (Fronteira, Alentejo, Portugal) have allowed discovering a villa with double-apse room crowned by a stibadium - the second to be identified in nowadays Portugal. The 90 m2 room was entirely paved with opus signinum, because the space was delicately flowed with water, creating an artificial scenario where nature and built structures combined. Walls were covered with polychromic mosaics, and aquatic elements decorated all the room. The data obtained from the excavations was so accurate that enabled some 3D and virtual reconstructions, with suggestive parallels inthe paradigmatic villa of Faragola (Ascoli Satriano, Italy). Further research, possible by collaboration with Leiden University (Netherlands) in the frame of the Fronteira Landscape Project, used georadar field survey, allowing to identify a major 2ha building, with two patios surrounded by perystiles. This is a common prototype used in the monumental villae that in the middle of the 3rd century begin to dominate the rural landscape in the province of Lusitania, but each site as unique solutions and designs, in the architectural planning, but also in the decorative programmes. A major overview of the results in Horta da Torre will be presented, with a balance of the six archaeological campaigns that took place since 2012, and also with the results from the GPR. In a wider context, other villae in the surrounding region will be referred, placing the Horta da Torre as one more element in the display of private entrepreneurship in the rural landscape in this territory.