In the summer of 2023, Saint Louis University historian Doug Boin, Ph.D., unearthed the foundations of a building in central Italy that could help recover a forgotten chapter of ancient Roman history.
It was a tense morning. Doug Boin, Ph.D.2023年7月31日，他和他的意大利合作者在一台熟练的挖掘机旁边待命 operator carefully scraped away layers of earth near Villa Fidelia in the central Italian town of Spello in the region of Umbria.
“那天早上，我和团队等了大约两个半小时，等待任何迹象 我们在正确的领域，我们没有浪费大家的时间和金钱。” Boin said.
博因和他的考古学家团队——其中包括独立研究人员弗朗西斯科 Giorgi and Danilo Nati; Stephen Kay, archaeology manager at the British School of Rome; and Letizia Ceccarelli, contract professor at Politecnico di Milano and British School of Rome research fellow — had identified their dig site using the advanced geophysical tools of ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry. These two technologies can help identify underground structures and characterize buried materials without 必须扰乱一粒土壤，但尖端的方法只提供 estimations of what might lie beneath meters of earth. So as the hours passed on the morning of July 31, 2023, Boin and his colleagues were starting to get nervous.
“We’re standing there huddled around this five-by-five-meter trench — 7:30, 8:30, 早上9点——等待磁力计和钻地的一些迹象 radar have led us to the right area. And there was nothing.”
但是，有二十多年考古经验的乔吉 digs to uncover ancient Roman artifacts in Italy, called the team’s attention to a sign of hope — a layer of pinkish soil starting to emerge as the excavator scraped away more material.
“He said, ‘This is a very good sign. Because I’ve worked in Umbria before, and the 粉红色的岩层是来自山坡的冲积沉积物，通常位于山顶 of Roman layers,’” Boin recalled him saying. “‘So if we’re about to find anything, it would happen soon.’”
With just a few more passes of its massive metal shovel, the excavator skimmed the top of the structures the team had seen in the subterranean scans of the site. They turned out to be human-made masonry. By the end of that first morning, the team, using 挖掘机停止轰鸣后，用手工具揭开了出现的东西的顶部 to be three thick stone walls.
Boin和他的同事们小心翼翼地没有夸大他们发现的重要性， but it’s hard to contain the excitement over what they may have unearthed from the Umbrian soil.
Hints of a Temple
他们之所以在翁布里亚挖掘是因为历史学家发现了一块四世纪的石碑 found in the 18th century. The 1.5-by-0.5-meter stone slab contains a message from 四世纪的罗马皇帝君士坦丁，他以皈依基督教而闻名 during his rule. The communication from Constantine was a response to the Roman citizens of Spello seeking a reprieve from traveling to a faraway religious festival. Constantine 答应了他们的请求，允许他们在斯派洛举行自己的庆祝活动，但是 作为回报，他们需要为君士坦丁和他的祖先建造一座神庙，继续 a long-standing Roman tradition of the “imperial cult,” in which emperors and their families were worshiped as deities.
这个铭文总是很引人注目，因为它指的是君士坦丁皇帝的祖先 as divine,” said Boin. “And this is a part of Roman religion, which we would classify 异教，但这发生在罗马帝国趋向基督教的时期.”
Boin and his collaborators zeroed in on the resplendent, Renaissance-era property on the outskirts of Spello called the Villa Fidelia. The Villa Fidelia sits atop an 由考古学家发掘并确定的古代宗教圣地 被该地区的土著居民，即“翁布里人”所使用 the eighth century BCE. It is also a likely origin for the stone slab that references the temple to Constantine. “That was generally the precise region that we were able 从发现铭文的档案材料中确定“博因” said.
尽管历史学家已经发现了关于斯贝洛文化背景的零碎线索 in the time of Constantine from digs in and around Villa Fidelia, no one had ever located a structure that was sufficiently grandiose and properly aged to be called the “magnificent undertaking,” as referenced in the inscription, dedicated to the Christian emperor and his ancient relations.
“There was a mosaic found, in the backroom of one of the properties. There was maybe 在山坡上发现的一堵墙的遗迹，标志着其中一个梯田。” Boin said. “But no major monumental structure has ever been associated with it.”
因此，他和他的团队将目光瞄准了那些大型开放花园和草坪 not been excavated. In 2019, Boin received a Beaumont Scholarship Research Award from 博彩网址大全 to conduct a geophysical survey of Villa Fidelia and the surrounding grounds.
“我们希望在最好的情况下，我们能找到一个巨大的纪念碑 temple that dated to the period of Constantine, or in the event that maybe we were overthinking things, that there would just be some other evidence for the history 从它在土著时代的建立到它的转变 the Roman period, up to the late Middle Ages,” Boin said.
Boin和他的合作者进行了探地雷达和磁力测量 of the Villa Fidelia and its grounds in 2021. Local archaeological officials at Spello 他们还提出要扫描别墅对面的一个停车场 Boin accepted.
“What came back from ... the parking lot was clearly defined Roman walls that were joined at right angles and were identified at a depth of anywhere between [1 and 2 meters] beneath the surface. And it did look promising as an ancient structure.”
所以在2023年，在获得博彩网址大全的博蒙特奖和 local authorities and the Ministry of Culture in Rome, Boin and his collaborators 在7月下旬那个紧张的早晨，我看着一位熟练的挖掘机操作人员刮开 millennia of history until he reached the pink paydirt. Three stone walls emerged after another two weeks of careful digging, and these ruins may serve as the most 有确凿的证据表明帝制崇拜和渐进式崇拜之间存在重叠 shift to Christianity during the rule of Emperor Constantine. They may be the walls 君士坦丁命令斯贝洛的公民建造了几个世纪的神庙 ago.
“They were nothing like the foundations of what a potential Roman house would be, because they were twice as thick,” Boin said. “So the team ... instantly hypothesized [the excavated walls] were the interior walls and the potential exterior walls of a Roman temple.”
Layers of History
停车场下面的挖掘不仅发现了可能是寺庙的遗迹， but it unearthed clues to about 800 years of history, according to Boin. At the lowest point of the dig site, Boin and his team found small, bronze religious dedications and other artifacts left by the Umbri people around the fifth or fourth century BCE. These rare finds alone are noteworthy among archaeologists. Above that layer, the researchers found evidence of a structure that could have been either a Roman water channel or part of a fountain from the second century BCE. But the monumental structure — in the form of the three adjoining walls — most excited Boin and his colleagues.
“It was absolutely a stunning discovery,” said Ceccarelli. “For the past 300 years, historians and archaeologists have been guessing at the size, shape, and location of this ancient sanctuary space.”
Though Boin and his colleagues are careful to not yet conclude that they’ve found 君士坦丁的神庙，如果他们证实了他们的假设，这个发现可能代表 是罗马从帝国崇拜向基督教演变的重要标志 Empire. Such a material revelation in the reconstruction of Roman history is illustrative of the broader contributions of archaeology to the telling of the human story.
“我们用来创造时期的历史日期，我们用来创造 当你深入到这一层面时，我们那种整洁有序的年表感觉真的分崩离析了 地面上的日常生活，尤其是在四世纪这样的时期，当 罗马帝国正在经历重大的社会、文化和宗教变革。 Boin. “What you see in the archaeology is just how messy — literally — life was when people lived through these major moments of punctuated change. And that, I think, is just very important from a microhistorical point of view. So in many ways, archaeology 可以进来摇着我们说，‘你可能认为你知道这个故事的方式 goes, but you don’t.’ That I think is the most fun part of doing the discovery. New evidence changes the way you tell the story," said Boin.
Future Digs Into the Past
Boin和他的合作者的任务是在2024年回到斯佩洛进一步研究 挖掘遗址，确认他们找到了君士坦丁神庙. 考古队将采用同样的方法，在挖掘之前对遗址进行扫描 “下一轮的发现，”凯说，他负责监督地球物理测量 site before digging began.
“I like [that] I can be involved from the very outset through the noninvasive work [to] the excavation and then the post-excavation work, as well,” Kay said. “Ideally, 与莱蒂齐亚和道格一起，我们想进一步确认 ground penetration radar results, but that's dependent on successful funding.”
确保这笔资金不仅对完成他们在维拉的工作至关重要 菲德里亚，但如果他们能自信地声称他们已经 found the temple to Constantine, according to Boin.
“I would hope that that would be the next round of funding. Not only toward the study of the site, but toward the preservation of the site,” he said. “Because it would be so historically significant at that stage that I wouldn’t want to just walk away knowing that it’s hidden in the ground after it’s been published and reported and extensively documented. I would love, if it did turn out to be a significant find, 能够参与确保它仍然是意大利文化的一部分 heritage.”
Story by Bob Grant, executive director of communications, research.
This piece was written for the 2023 博彩网址大全 Research Institute Annual Impact Report. The Impact Report is printed each spring to share 我们的研究人员在过去一年的成功，并分享博彩网址大全的故事 rise as a preeminent Jesuit research university. More information can be found here.