Posted on 04/30/2006 4:38:05 PM PDT by gd124
THE archeologists could barely hide their excitement. Beneath the main square of Ecija, a small town in southern Spain, they had unearthed an astounding treasure trove of Roman history.
They discovered a well-preserved Roman forum, bath house, gymnasium and temple as well as dozens of private homes and hundreds of mosaics and statues — one of them considered to be among the finest found.
But now the bulldozers have moved in. The last vestiges of the lost city known as Colonia Augusta Firma Astigi — one of the great cities of the Roman world — have been destroyed to build an underground municipal car park.
Dr Sonia Zakrzewski, a senior lecturer in archeology at Southampton University who has worked on the site, said: “It is a real shock when things like this happen. I am surprised it has gone ahead. There is no doubt this site is of fundamental importance to archeology.”
Much of the site has been hurriedly concreted over: the only minor concession to archeologists and historians, is to leave a tiny section on show for tourists. The rest will be space for 299 cars.
The Roman city has proved to be one of the biggest in the ancient world. Its estimated 30,000 citizens dominated the olive oil industry. Terracotta urns from Ecija have been discovered as far away as Britain and Rome.
The region produced three Roman emperors — Trajan, Theodosius and Hadrian — and the research has shown that Ecija was almost as important in the Roman world as Cordoba and Seville.
The socialist council says that had it not dug up the main square, Plaza de Espana, to build the car park in 1998, the remains would never have been found. But it insists the town must press ahead with the new car park.
“Nonsense,” says the town’s chief archeologist, Antonio Fernandez Ugalde, director of the municipal museum. “For some reason, the politicians here think it is more important to park their own cars. It simply does not make sense.”
But despite opposition from numerous other archeological groups and the Spanish Royal Academy of Art, there is now no possibility of restoring the 2,000-year-old Roman town.
The most exquisite discovery was a statue, known as the Wounded Amazon, modelled on an ancient Greek goddess of war. Only three other such statues are known to exist. The one in Ecija is in by far the best condition with some of its original decorative paint intact.
Juan Wic, the mayor, who is responsible for the car park project, said he was happy to have kept one of his main election pledges. He said it was “essential for the commercial future of the square and city”
Not to worry. A hundred years from now, they'll tear up the pavement and find the Roman town again.
"There is nothing more beautiful in this world than a parking lot."
Yep. People travel all over the World to photograph them.
To a socialist, there is no past, only tomorow. What was thao old Communist saying? The future is known, the past is always changing.
Are you talking as in monkey's or migrant Frenchmen?
This is nuts!
Barbarians-R-Us!
Monkees, babboons and apes, The non-human variety....wait a sec, that doesn't help...er...ah...the ones that don't drink and whine.
Under the Socialists, everything but the Islamic past will be erased.
Soon the Muslims will re-take their beloved Al-Andalus.
The do in Chicago!
Hey do you have this song? LOL.
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"Makes ya sick" bump.
In some ways that is not such a bad thing. As a former archaeologist, it pains me to see sites excavated in the early 1900s and know that they destroyed a whole lot of information that *today* we could have retrieved. In 100 or 200 years, who knows what they could retrieve?
So long as the parking lot doesn't negatively impact the site, I don't really see the problem.
I guess we'll never know now.
We've lost so much history due to ignorance, greed and bureaucratic incompetence and impatience, you'd think that by now, we'd be a little more supportive these days, especially when you run accross something that is as well preserved as they say this site was.
I certainly believe we should preserve ancient sites that would add to our fundamental knowledge of the Roman empire we don't know.
But sometimes its the little things that one discovers that can alter our fundamental understanding of things, or support a theory that had no corresponding evidence before. Who knows what they could have found there.
If the world were thrown into a cataclyism that destroyed everything and several thousand years pass and the surviving people run accross a burried but preserved Tampa, they may very well find it interesting.
> They do in Chicago!
Coffee --> Nose --> Keyboard...
Thanks a lot!
Well, not quite. In the US we have the Historic Preservation Act, or whatever the latest incarnation is called, and that comes into play whenever federal money's involved.
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