Understanding how and when the first Forum was created has always been considered as a crucial step to reconstruct the urban formation in Rome and in central Italy more generally.
Lacking palaces and large temples, the beginning of early Italian urbanism can be detected primarily from the creation of public spaces in the center of the settlement, like the Forum in Rome. Since the 1990s, the dominant theory for Rome has envisioned that the Forum valley had always been seasonally flooded, thus requiring mitigation during the 8th and the 7thcenturies BCE to be turned into a public piazza—the first major collective effort of the Romans.
Recent data from a borehole survey, however, now shows that the environment of early Roman
valleys changed radically during the 6th century BCE, probably because of human impacts along the broader river basin. Over the course of only a few decades, meters of sediment were deposited, the Tiber riverbed moved and was raised, and the Tiberine island emerged for the first time, only then allowing the creation of earliest piazza.
This re-dating of the Roman Forum has major implication for our understanding of early urbanism in central Italy.
In his talk, Nicola Terrenato will discuss his recent archaeological fieldwork in Rome, related to borehole surveys in the Roman forum.