by
David Soren, Professor of Classics, University of Arizona
and
Noelle Soren, Director of Photography, Lugnano Expeditions
Color Drawings by William Aylward

In addition, we would like to thank all the dozens of students and staff members who participated over the years. Particular thanks must go to our patron angel Giuseppina Borghetti, field supervisor and director Harry Heywood, palynologist Karen Adams, forensic anthropologists Walter Birkby and Todd Fenton, artist William Aylward, conservators Jane Williams, Katy Untch and Leslie Ransick, pottery specialists Archer Martin and Carla Piraino. Our constant supporters the University of Arizona and the University of Arizona Foundation and the Comune of Lugnano in Teverina deserve a special thanks.

Lugnano in Teverina, a hill town in southern Umbria built along the ancient Via Amerina north of Rome, has long been noted for its fine Church of Santa Maria Assunta, a gem of twelfth century Romanesque design, and its picturesque streets and byways. Since 1988 it has also become known for the ruins of a Roman villa of the first century B.C. found on the hill known as Poggio Gramignano southwest of the town. In antiquity this region was peppered with as many as fifty country villas of the Roman elite who enjoyed the climate and fertile fields of the area. Though none of these has been fully excavated and opened to the public, the ruins of many of these are known all over this region near the juncture of the Tiber River and the Rio Grande, as are the remains of other Roman structures such as river ports, bridges and walls.

In 1988 a team from the University of Arizona, sponsored by the Soprintendenza archaeologica per l'Umbria, the local city government (comune) and the Associazione Pro Loco of Lugnano in Teverina headed by Sr. Claudio Finistauri began digging at Poggio Gramigmnano to follow up the initial excavations there begun by Daniela Monacchi of the Soprintindenza in 1982 and 1984. The spot chosen appeared to be the ruins of a small villa on the southeast side of the hill.

The townspeople of Lugnano were enthusiastic about our work, and many of them spent their days off helping us excavate. As work progressed it was a surprise to us all when it became clear that the villa had been immense (6000 square feet), covering most of the hill and ranging down its slope in terraces.

It featured a sumptuous dining room/reception area (oecus - Room 4) surrounded on three sides by an arcade springing from columns and a corridor paved with black and white mosaics. The dining room itself featured a pavement of opus scutulatum, varicolored marble chunks set in a field of black cubes (tesserae).

As we excavated in Room 4, we discovered that its ceiling and upper walls had collapsed later first or early second century. Part of the room was cleared and a hearth or oven was installed, but much of the room remained a ruin and was untouched for centuries, preserving the exact position of the features of the room as they fell. Careful excavation of columns, arches, wall and ceiling frescos with attention to archaeological formation processes enabled us to reconstruct the original form of the room including much of its decoration. Thanks to the survival of fresco in this collapse, our staff artist William Aylward and Barbara Maiurina of the University of Trento were able to recontruct features of the room including the unusual truncated pyramidal ceiling painted with a linear design rising over the opus scutulatum floor.

Nothing quite like this room has been documented in Roman villa architecture. It is distinct from the Vitruvian forms of the Corinthian oecus with its barrel vaulted central space and his Egyptian oecus with flat-roofed halls and side aisles.

Hundreds of other fresco fragments when studied revealed that this room had been sumptuously decorated. Adjacent Room 8 was found to be a dining room (triclinium) with a black and white mosaic pavement revealed to us beneath large chunks of fallen concrete superstructure. A service and storage area to the northwest (Room 15 ) featured a travertine stairway to a second level.

Besides mosaics and frescos, other elegant architectural features from the original construction phase of the villa such as antefixes decorated with Gorgon heads and others with dolphins and palmettes were unearthed. It is believed they originally lined the cornice of the villa alternating one type with the other.

Within 75 years of its construction the villa at Poggio Gramignano began to fall into ruin, the result of its construction on a level of clay- rich soil which slipped to the southwest causing the villa's walls to fissure, torque, buckle and fall. Though efforts were made to shore up the walls with bricks bearing stamps of the late first to late second centuries, the villa's life declined.

Sometime in the mid-fifth century some of the rooms to the northwest were reused as an infant cemetery. In areas sheltered by the remains of fallen vaults on the west side of the villa in rooms which had formerly served as storage magazines (Rooms 10, 11, 12, 15 and 17) the skeletons of 47 infants have been unearthed in 41 single and multiple burials. The infants ranged in age from premature fetuses to two to three years, but most (40) were premature to newborn. Some of the older infants had been buried in reused amphorae, jars once used for the storage of wine or foodstuffs. Others were interred on roof tiles or in simple tombs made of tiles. Skeletons of premature infants found in two southern rooms which overlap a refuse dump were found disarticulated and scattered indicating they had been buried with little ceremony.

In Roman times there was no tradition of burying babies in cemeteries. In fact, the Romans believed that infants dying before the ninth day of life should not be lamented or formally buried. Since the infant mortality rate was as high as 30 percent it is not surprising that, according to Cicero, Romans disciplined themselves to not invest too much love in children who might suddenly die. It may not have been until the fourth century and the coming of Christianity with the Emperor Constantine that infant burial became common; and it was not until the ninth century that infants and adults were often buried side by side ih the same cemetery. Since no Christian artifacts were found with the infants of Lugnano, it is possible that Christain burial practices had been adopted by non-Christians in this case.

Finds associated with the cemetery date its installation to the middle of the fifth century A.D. Study of the stratigraphy of the cemetery itself and of the finds suggest that all the infants were interred over a short period of time - a few weeks or months - and that only a few deaths occurred at first allowing single burials followed by a period of escalating death rate necessitating multiple burials of as many as seven infants in the upper levels of the cemetery. This scenario suggests an epidemic caused these deaths, killing many infants and causing pregnant women to miscarry.

Many artifacts were found associated with the burials which might have been offerings including a child's bracelet, a bone doll and two bronze cauldrons found one within the other. Other finds suggest an epidemic struck this community and that the people may have turned to withcraft for a solution.

Interred near many of the infants were the remains of at least 12 puppies all less than six months old and one dog about a year old, all found with various body parts, usually heads or mandibles, missing. Since puppies held a prominent place in Roman folk practices, it is likely that these puppies lost their body parts as the result of ritual practices. Such practices were often followed in an attempt to counter an epidemic. According to Pliny, puppies were thought to absorb the power of a disease when the sucked milk from an ailing person's mouth. If the puppies were then killed and buried, underwold demons who caused the disease could be warded off. Evidence suggests that the Lugnano puppies were torn apart before burial perhaps in a ritual to calm evil forces associated with miscarriages as well as disease. Mothers in cases like this were considered to be unclean and the soul of their dead fetus or infant was regarded as a dangerous force that could be harnessed by sorcerers to prey on the living.

In one burial at Poggio Gramignano, the child's feet had been secured by stones and a brick, possibly in an effort to keep it's soul from rising and preying on the living. Another child was found buried with a raven's talon, a traditional witch's symbol associated with the underworld and the dead which could act as a talisman to ward off evil. Another baby was found with the partial skeleton of a toad considered by ancient sorcerers to be a powerful remedy against disease and fever. Another was found near a pot placed upside down with its open mouth to the earth holding bone fragments within.

Such offerings were often made to underworld dieties such as Hecate, queen of demons and underworld magic who reanimated the dead and escorted the souls of those who had died before their time to the underworld. She was, above all, associated with dogs and especially puppies in her rituals. Could Hecate or another similar local god or goddess been the honored recipient of these offerings to the infants of Lugnano? If so, what calamity befell the community to bring on these rituals? Was it an epidemic that took a few lives at first and then many? If so, what was its cause?

Many Latin writers attest that the disease malaria was widespread in ancient Italy. It was believed to be caused by "bad air" near swamps and marshes associated with riparian areas like those surrounding the hill of Poggio Gramignano. Accounts of travelers through the area of Lugnano, like that of the wealthy Gallic ambassador Sidonius Apollinaris who passed through this area in the summer of A.D. 467, describe difficulties with bad air, fevers, chills, sweats and thirst, all of which suggest malaria was present. In addition, it is recorded in the Novellae divi Valentiniani, a fifth century collection of Roman laws, that Attila the Hun, when preparing to march on Rome from north Italy in A.D. 452,was deterred at the last minute for a number of reasons including the existence of a pestilence to the south. Though the exact nature of the pestilence is not disclosed, the experience of Sidonius just fifteen years later suggests that it may have been malaria.

Some forms of this disease can bring on fevers, chills, headaches, enlarged spleens (splenomegaly), convulsions, vomiting, miscarriages, stillbirths, coma and death. One strain, plasmodium falciparum, which was endemic to ancient Italy and which reached its full strength in Italy about the time of the Lugnano epidemic,was particularly devastating to newborns, who had no chance to build up resistence. This form can survive winter's cold by living in blood cells awaiting a vector, a single mosquito, to transmit the disease to another host and reinfect a community after a dormant period. Or it could be reintroduced periodically by travelers coming up the swampy Tiber from the port of Ostia on their way north from an infected area like Sardinia which was famous for its fevers. P. falciparum infecting and devastating a population already weakened by a less serious strain on the fever like P. vivax, another strain present in ancient Italy, is a scenario seen frequently in Africa and is one which would fit the evidence at Poggio Gramignano. P. falciparum survived in Italy until the early 1950s when a concentrated effort to eradicate it finally succeeded.

Is there additional evidence to support the P. falciparum hypothesis? Burnt honeysuckle wood (woodbine) found as possible offerings in the cemetery suggested the suspected epidemic caused deaths to occur in the hot summer months, the time when malaria flourishes. But honeysuckle is not a common offering at Roman gravesites. Pliny notes that periclymenon, the honeysuckle shrub Lonicera etrusca, was a medicine with many uses including treatment of diseases of the spleen. In addition, dogs and especially puppies were often sacrificed to alleviate or prevent fevers and other illnesses attributed to the Dog Star, Sirius, which rises and sets with the sun between July 3 and August 11, the time of year malaria thrives, mosquitoes bite and honeysuckle blossoms and goes to seed.

There is no doubt that something terrible befell the infants of Lugnano in the middle of the fifth century A.D. A number of causes may be hypothesized, but the evidence from the University of Arizona excavations at Poggio Gramignano suggests that malaria is the most likely culprit for the pestilence which carried off the 47 tiny victims we found.

Visitors to the town of Lugnano in Teverina today can see the results of our work in the Antiquarium constructed by our students, specialists and local towspeople in the city hall (comune).

All Images Copyright Noelle Soren, 1996

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