Figure 9: Stone walled modern field boundary, partly coinciding with the circuit wall of the Roman city
Here the city wall could be traced in a straight line, parallel with the Rio Sever and the modern road along it. The ancient wall location partly coincides with a modern field boundary, in part marked by a small dividing wall, and with the location of the northern wall of the museum and a former farm building (Fig. 9).
Our hypothesis, already formulated during the first field campaign, that this simple field boundary was a remainder of the original Roman wall, was confirmed during the 2003-2004 excavation campaigns near the archaeological museum. On this side of the city the defences, or more accurately the town enclosure, consisted of a double system, with a V-shaped ditch, cut into the schist bedrock on the exterior and the actual wall on the interior (Fig. 10).
The ditch is quite shallow (nowhere deeper than 1.40m below the original surface level) and seems also to have had a drainage function. The c.1.25m thick wall had a foundation of large river pebbles bound by whitish mortar, cut into the schist bedrock, and an upstanding wall structure of irregular ashlar blocks (mostly granite and quartzite) bound by an emplekton of mortar. The remains of this wall could be observed over a length of more than 100m, starting from a slight bend near the north-eastern corner of the town. Almost halfway along this north-eastern side of the town we noticed an interesting concentration of well-cut blocks of granite, lying around in the adjacent field. One of them is clearly the base of a column of the same type as the columns near the so-called 'porta sul', which could indicate that here also we are confronted with elements of a former city gate.
Figure 9: Stone walled modern field boundary, partly coinciding with the circuit wall of the Roman city
Figure 10: Excavation in 2004 of the north-eastern side of the circuit wall of Ammaia (courtesy of the Fundacao Cidade de Ammaia)
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