Under construction – watch this space!

Duke University set up in 2015 a new excavation project in Renieblas (Soria, Spain), where at least five Roman camps loosely dated to the 2nd-1st centuries BCE were found in the early 20th century. The camps were involved in the early conquest of the province of Hispania and the siege of the native settlement at Numantia, which resulted in Rome’s annexation of much of the Iberian Peninsula in 133 BCE. Many basic and important questions about Renieblas (including the chronology of each of the camps) remain unanswered despite the spectacular results of Schulten’s excavations at the site between 1914 and 1931. His interpretation of the camps remains problematic and the analysis of the archaeological finds (stored in the RGZM, Mainz) contested, due to the lack of archaeological context. However, Renieblas continues to figure prominently in analyses of the Roman Republican army, the early phases of the conquest of Hispania, and the basic structure of the Republican army, not in small part because according to Schulten, the archaeological remains clearly corresponded to the best description of a Roman camp that has survived from Roman times, written by Polybius in the 2nd c. BCE (History, book 6). 

 This webpage will present the most important results of the last three fieldwork seasons (2015-2017), in which we have documented for the first time a series of artifacts in archaeological context (ceramic, fragments of arms and armor, coins), studied faunal remains and dated organic samples (charcoal and bones) using C-14. In 2019 and 2020 we combined different techniques (LiDAR, photogrammetry, terrestrial scanners, archaeological survey, historical maps and aerial pictures), to create a single orthographic archaeological plan that we hope will shed new light on the vexed problem of the structure and internal layout of Roman camps in the 2nd c. BCE.