Cosa, where the writer did his first excavating, may be used to supply a little more detail on materials and methods in field archaeology. Seven eight-week spring seasons of excavation there (1948–1954), modestly intended as laboratory training for young American classicists, have in fact resulted in a remarkably complete picture of an old-style Latin colony. The site was chosen for excavating because it looked attractive from air photographs, because it was convenient to Rome (ninety miles up the Via Aurelia on the Tyrrhenian Sea), and because its walls were almost perfectly preserved, great gray masses of polygonal limestone looming up as high as a four-story building on a 370-foot hill that rises out of the reclaimed swamplands of the Tuscan Maremma. For Cosa was planted, carved out of the territory of the once proud Etruscan city of Vulci, to mount guard over Rome’s newly acquired marches, and to affirm Rome’s name and supremacy in a restive neighborhood.
A large assortment of gear is necessary for a modern scientific dig, even a modest one: for surveying and levelling, clinometer (which measures slopes), plane-table (which measures angles), alidade (which shows degree of arc), prismatic compass with front and back sights (for taking accurate bearings; the prism brings the object being sighted, the hair-line of the front sight, and the reading on the compass card all in a vertical line together), leveling staves marked in centimeters (for measuring elevations); templates for recording the curves of moldings; brooms, brushes, and mason’s tools for cleaning the architectural finds; zinc plates and sodium hydroxide pencils for electrolysis of coins; measuring tapes of all sizes, mechanical drawing instruments, trowels, marking-pegs, cord, squared paper, large sheets of filter paper for taking “squeezes” of inscriptions, catalogue cards, India ink, shellac, cardboard boxes, small cloth bags, labels, journal books, field notebooks, and a small library of technical manuals. The gear was divided between the villa where the staff lived and an abandoned Italian anti-aircraft observation post on the site itself, whose concrete gunmounts made excellent drying floors for freshly washed potsherds.
Ambitious excavations use a light railway for carting earth to the dump, but at Cosa, which ran on a shoestring budget ($5000 for eight weeks), the vehicle was the wheelbarrow, the track a set of boards bound at the ends with iron to keep them from splitting. Twenty of the local unemployed formed the corps of workmen. The foreman, in better times a master carpenter, used a pick with all the delicacy of a surgeon with a scalpel.
The first step in excavating a site is to lay down a grid—fifty-meter squares are convenient—marked with wooden stakes set in cement and levelled. During the ten months of the year when there was no digging and Cosa was abandoned to the shepherds, they operated on the conviction that the stakes marked the spot where the treasure lay buried. They would overturn them and dig like badgers, and each new season would have to begin with a partial re-survey.
A typical excavating day would begin with the removal of surface earth in wheelbarrows. As large objects came to light—bits of amphora, roof-tile, terracotta revetments—they were placed in shallow yard-square wooden boxes called barrelle, equipped fore and aft with carrying shafts, and labelled accurately with the precise designation of the area from which the finds came: Capitolium Exterior South, Level I; Arx North Slope, Surface, and the like. Small objects—bone styli, small sherds, loomweights (pierced terracotta parallelepipeds, whose weight held the threads hanging straight down on an ancient vertical loom), lamps, fragments of inscriptions—went into separate marked cloth bags. Thus the horizontal and vertical findspot of each object was precisely known, so that when a dated or datable object was found in a level, the whole level could be automatically dated, and so the whole mosaic painstakingly put together and the history of the site analyzed, or, as the archaeologist says, “read.” The meanest potsherd, accurately defining a context, thus becomes more valuable historically than a whole museum shelf full of gold jewelry from an unstratified dig.
When a barrella and a set of cardboard boxes had been filled, they were carried to the excavation shack and sorted. Objects that could not be “read”—shapeless bits of rubble, parts of coarse pots without profile of base or rim—were discarded, the rest sent to be washed. After washing and drying, cataloguing began. Every object was painted with a small square of shellac, on which its catalogue number was written in India ink and then shellacked over to preserve it. A letter indicated the dig, another the season, a number showed the place of the object in the chronological sequence of finds. A typical entry might read like the card, p. [101]. Leica or plate photographs were taken of all important finds and separately indexed for ready reference in the final publication.
CC 1487 Capitolium Exterior South
Level I
Moulded terra-cotta revetment
Width 0.17 (centimeters)
Height 0.14
Thickness 0.03Pale pink terra-cotta, much pozzolana. All edges preserved, slight crack lower right corner. Nail-holes each corner. Strigillated cornice moulding above, finishing in a half-round moulding, enriched thunderbolt pattern in field. Thunderbolt runs from upper left to lower right, tapering to points at ends, hand grip in center; enriched on either side of hand grip with seven-point sword-and-sickle palmettes. Photograph.
After the workmen’s day (7:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M., with a half-hour for lunch) was over, there was still much for the staff to do. Pottery, spread out on trestle tables, had to be examined, joins made where possible, types distinguished. (Careful attention at Cosa to plain Roman black glaze has led to an arrangement of types in a dated series which will be useful for future dating on other sites.) Evenings were devoted to writing up the journal, studying the manuals, making drawings, planning the next day’s dig, and shop talk. The results of a typical season’s work, in 1950 on the arx at Cosa ([Fig. 4.4]), were to isolate a second temple at right angles to the Capitolium, restore on paper the design of several sets of terracotta revetments, follow the line of the Via Sacra from the arx gate to the Capitolium, clear the arx wall, get down to bedrock beside the Capitolium, discover a terracotta warrior who was part of the pedimental sculpture of an older temple under the excavation shack, and in general get a pretty clear idea of the religious center of the colony as it was, perhaps, in the time of the elder Cato, in the early second century B.C.
Fig. 4.4 Cosa, arx. (F. E. Brown)