La valle del Velabro in età arcaica

Written sources on the Archaic Velabrum (strictly the portion of the low ground between the Palatine and the Capitol at the foot of the former, commonly the whole valley between the two hills) mention two small shrines and the beginning of an ascent to the Porta Romanula, a secondary entrance to the Palatine. Indirectly, to the valley refer notices on the construction of the Cloaca Maxima. Our most recent source of information about the valley have been deep corings which made it possible to re-construct its geomorphology before human interventions. Te central part, subject to the Tiber foods for several days in winter but dry for most of the year (the discovery which exploded our sources’ image of the zone as a navigable marsh, till then treatedas a fact), was fanked by gravel beds running at the bases of the Palatine and the Capitol, normally not afected by fooding. Te other fnding is that the earliest tiles used in Rome were made of clay extracted from the valley which remained the main source of material for ceramics during the frst hundred years of their large-scale production (ca. 625-530/500 B.C.). As the place of extraction of clay (and certainly of baking tiles and other ware) the valley, though adjoining the Forum Romanum, created just before, lay outside the urban area; the same results from the contemporaneity of the termination of these activities and the construction of the frst Servian Wall which embraced the entire valley. Two questions arise: frst, what was the form of the lower proto-Cloaca Maxima (even though its 7th-century Forum section had most probably been a covered channel, in the valley the original stream or an open channel should have been more than sufcient); and second, what was the course of pre-Servian fortifcations which protected the civic centre from the Tiber? Tis paper attempts to answer both questions, basing on the results of geological and archaeological survey of the zone, and on analysis of the lemma pectuscum Palati in Festus and the tradition on the Quiritium fossae.