In the necropolis, sometimes inhumation graves cut into cremation ones, sometimes vice versa. There is thus no ground for assuming that the cremation graves are older, especially as the grave-contents of the two types are so similar. The difference is not one of time but of funeral practice, as today; it suggests two different populations living peacefully together. The cremators were related to the people whose graves were found so long ago in the Alban Hills, and, as we have seen, to the Palatine hut-dwellers. Who were the inhumers? We know that other Roman hills than the Palatine were inhabited from very early times, though the natural features of the Palatine seem to give it priority: plenty of fodder, abundant water within easy reach, a retreat made safe at night by the hill and the river for the people and their livestock.
But habitation of the Esquiline and Quirinal Hills in the sixth century is attested by a number of tombs from a total of 164 found there in the 1870’s. The finds from these were never scientifically recorded, and they have never been published, but it is noteworthy that they include weapons, which are absent from the cremation-graves in the Forum. It looks as though the Esquiline folk were invaders, with a more warlike tradition than the Palatine hut-dwellers. The Esquiline folk might earlier have used the Forum necropolis for inhumation. We know that the Sabines buried their dead. Literary tradition (the Rape of the Sabine Women) records that the early Romans got their wives from among the Sabines. Numa Pompilius, the second of the legendary Roman kings, bears a Sabine name. Might not the two types of graves in the Forum necropolis represent the peaceful fusion of cremating Latins and inhuming Sabines who had laid aside their warlike ways?
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On top of the Forum necropolis, when the swamp was drained, huts were built. The archaeological evidence for this phase of early Rome’s history was provided by Boni’s stratigraphic excavation (recently confirmed by the Swede Einar Gjerstad) to the northwest of the site of the equestrian statue of the Emperor Domitian in the middle of the Forum. Gjerstad dug a trench sixteen feet long and eleven feet wide, down to virgin soil, which he found nineteen feet below the present Forum level. On the earth wall of the trench the story of the centuries could be read in the successive levels (Figs. [3.3] and [3.4]). Between levels three and nineteen, six pavements could be counted, but level nineteen takes us, to judge by the pots found in it, only back to about 450 B.C. In layers twenty to twenty-two, Gjerstad found three pebble pavements, which he dates about 575 B.C. If he is right in assigning to this date the beginning of monarchic Rome, he has pushed its date down in our direction over 150 years from the traditional 753 B.C. But there is more history below this. Strata twenty-three to twenty-eight are remains of huts, similar to but (pottery again) later than the ones on the Palatine. Gjerstad dates them in two phases: 650–625 and 625–575 B.C. Rather than push the traditional date down so far, it seems plausible to suppose that these huts represent the period assigned by the literary tradition to the early kings, and to argue that the sophisticated period, symbolized by the Forum’s earliest pebble pavement, was inaugurated by Rome’s earliest Etruscan king, Tarquin I.
Fig. 3.3 Rome, Forum. Excavation at Equus Domitiani, showing strata. (E. Gjerstad, Early Rome I, p. 37)
Fig. 3.4 Rome, Forum. Excavation at Equus Domitiani, schematic drawing of strata. (E. Gjerstad, Antiquity 26 [1952], p. 61)
These other huts confirm the other archaeological data, which show that what later was unified into urban Rome was originally a group of simple hut-villages clustered on various hills, the Forum huts having spilled down, as it were, from the village on the Palatine. The huts in the level just above the Forum necropolis represent a still earlier stage of this spillover; they antedate the earliest huts in Gjerstad’s twenty-nine levels. By the date of Gjerstad’s earliest pebble pavements, the huts in the necropolis area have been replaced by a more developed domestic architecture, perhaps with rooms opening on a central court. These houses have rectangular plans, mud-brick, wood-braced walls, and tufa foundations. At the spillover stage, the villagers from the various hills formed some kind of confederation symbolized archaeologically by the two types of graves in the Forum necropolis, and in literature by the tradition of the joint religious festival called the Septimontium.
The period of the first pebble pavement (575 B.C.) is one of major change, from village to urban life, to a city now for the first time boasting a civic center, destined to become the world’s most famous public square, the Roman Forum. Of the same date are the earliest remains on the Capitoline Hill, which was to be the arx or citadel of historic Rome. Of the same date are the earliest artifacts from the Regia, which later generations revered as the palace of the kings. Of the same date is a sophisticated phase of the round shrine of Vesta, which encircled the sacred flame, symbol of the city’s continuity. The literary tradition would date the last two earlier, at least to Numa’s reign. However no architectural remains have so far been discovered which associate them with the earlier date.