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Centre de Restauració de Béns Mobles de Catalunya
INNOVATION & RESEARCH
JOSEP ANTON REMOLÀ VALLVERDÚ
The Roman villa of Els Munts: The historical and archaeological context THE ROMAN VILLAGE OF ELS MUNTS, LOCATED AROUND 12 KM NORTHEAST OF TARRACO, IS THE RESULT OF A COMPLEX SUCCESSION OF BUILDINGS Introduction The Roman villa of Els Munts, located around 12 km northeast of Tarraco, is the outcome of a complex succession of buildings generated over more than seven centuries of steady and virtually uninterrupted occupation. In the almost 200 years of the existence of the early imperial villa of Els Munts, its period of peak splendour and architectural development, the buildings underwent a series of transformations which, together with the constructions of earlier and later buildings, comprise an architectural reality that is complex to interpret and articulate. This complexity, already sensed in the earliest excavation campaigns, was confirmed in later archaeological interventions, which are the foundation of the first proposed hypothesis on the architectural evolution of the villas which succeeded one another in the Roman and late ancient world. After it was abandoned at some uncertain point in the 7th century, much of the remains were disassembled primarily by humans, but also by weather. This continued until the 1960S, when the Provincial Archaeology Museum under the stewardship of PM Berges (1970, 1977) started an extensive excavation programme which partly affected the upper platform and the garden and almost entirely encompassed the triclinium and adjacent areas, the “Castel” reservoir, the southern baths and what are known as the “beach baths”. The main documentary source available comes from the excavations undertaken by the National Archaeology Museum of Tarragona (MNAT) under the direction of F Tarrats between 1995 and 2007 (Tarrats et al. 1998, 2000, 2008; Tarrats/Remolà 2007).
RESCAT
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Schematic layout of the Roman villa of Els Munts. Photo: ©MNAT Archive
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