Unearthing History on the Shores of Lago Trasimeno
The end of the digging season for Umbra’s Trasimeno Archaeology Field School, took place not under the beating sun in the midst of an olive orchard but rather in the vaulted, frescoed grand hall of a former noble palace in the Umbrian hilltop city of Castiglione del Lago. Yesterday, the professors who ran the dig, notables from local institutions, and of course the students who had actually spent six weeks in the trenches of the dig came together for a press conference to discuss the results of this summer’s excavations.
Gratitude, Applause, and a Celebration of Teamwork
Local government officials took the mic first to thank The Umbra Institute and Depauw University for creating the archaeology program; this was followed by a short speech by Umbra professor Giampiero Bevagna, who explicitly thanked the students for all their hard work. Thereafter Professor Rebecca Schindler of Depauw University (also now the Director of the archaeology museum in Castiglione del Lago) and her colleague Professor Pedar Foss then presented drawings, videos, and drone footage of this year’s discoveries.
This Year’s Stunning Finds
There were many new revelations in this third season of digging at Umbra’s new site. The dig, instead of being in the middle of the countryside like previous sites, is literally in the shadow of the walls of Castiglione; students wielded picks and shovels, as well as small trowels and tiny brushes, while working amidst olive trees (and, often, their roots). This year’s excavations revealed an imposing Etruscan wall at the very top of the site, as well as a single inscription, an alpha written in the typical script of the area.
Ancient Engineering and a Century-Old Mystery Solved
In addition to this massive wall, students (directed by professors Bevagna, Foss, and Schindler) found a series of mechanisms to collect and channel water, including what seemed to be an ornamental waterfall over steps and even the base of a fountain. They also resolved a mystery from last year’s season: in one of the lower rooms there was a hard but uneven limestone surface. This year student workers broke through that and found a heterogeneous mix of limestone chips and wood–the best hypothesis is that the twelfth-century builders of the walls of Castiglione needed lime for their mortar. At some point quicklime (produced by burning limestone chips) was left out in the rain and it re-hardened into limestone.
Promise of More to Come
Despite all the new revelations, a number of mysteries remain: why was the site abandoned in the fifth century? Is it an isolated set of structures or part of a larger complex? Was it a residence or some sort of public building? These questions will only be resolved in the following summers, when archaeology majors from all over the US join local archaeologists to dig down through the layers of history and sift through time.