Roman history in the garden

When an archaeologist says that he or she is going to fieldwork, usually it means: spending hours under the sun, in a nice camp, field, between crops or in a forest,  valleys, bank of a river etc.

If you want to have a "fieldwork" in one of the biggest Roman cities of the Danubian provinces, you need to go in the gardens of Alba Iulia.

The Roman conurbation of Apulum (two cities formed in the neighbourhood of the legionary fort of the XIII Gemina legion) was abandoned in the 270's A.D. and became again an urban center - without a pause - since the 10/11th century. In this ten century, the ruins of the Roman city were reused as building material, destroyed, transformed, melted or simply ignored. Only after the Renaissance and especially in the Enlightenment in the 18th century, the local elite realized the importance of the Roman ruins and artifacts and begun to collect them in private collections. Till the work of Cserni Béla (known also as Albert or Adalbert Cserni) the Roman history of the city was known only from accidental excavations and discoveries. He formed the first museum and begun the urban archaeology in Alba Iulia.

In his letters we found already his complaining that the local people use the Roman material in the black market, sell the objects or use them as building material or decoration for their gardens. Similar description we found in the works of Virgil Cucuiu, history teacher who continued the work of Cserni in the 1920's and 30's.   

Both the territory of the Colonia Aurelia Apulensis,as the Municipium Septimium Apulense was severly damaged in the 20th century. A large part of the Roman cities were free, agricultural terrain tillthe 1960's, when numerous houses were built in the territory of the canabae or Municipium. The B-dul Incoronarii (6Martie, today 1 Decembrie 1918) is one of those streets, where every single garden has a Roman stone, brick statue base or column fragment. Older local people can evoke the moment when their or their parents' house were built and "large and long stone walls and ditches were found" in the backyard. Similarly, in the Strada Ferdinand I., Basarabiei, Munteniei where Cserni excavated and the palace of the governor was situated, is still full with Roman material (bricks, stones, construction material). 

These pictures were made by the authors of these lines in July, 2015 during one single afternoon.