Centuriazione ed evoluzione degli assetti agrari intorno alla città di Bracara Augusta (Hispania Citerior Tarraconensis)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the organization of the rural landscape around the Roman town of Bracara Augusta and the changing patterns of rural organization, during the Roman and Medieval time. Using data provided by the research project on the rural cadaster of Bracara Augusta we will propose a centuriation that organizes itself in modules of 20 by 20 actus with a predominant orientation of 16º N-NW, what may be inferred by the clear intersection of some important axes. We have also detected two cippi with the upper face engraved with a cross, separated by 20 actus, and probably connected with limits or termini. These main axes are also confirmed by a tank near a source identified as an archa petrinea and a votive altar dedicated to Mars by a family of fullones, that might have been used to delimitate a centuria at the north of Bracara Augusta, later used to bind Dume, a Roman villa to which a Suevian-Visigothic and a medieval occupation followed. In fact, we want to emphasize that this particular area cannot be restricted to the inventory of the material data of the romanization period. In practical terms, it allows to make sense of the vast amount of documentation available in Braga archives, which can result in a crucial study on the permanence, transformation, reuse and recycling of lines and shapes. An illustration of the research, already initiated, is the new approach to the indexes of the chapter’s properties (casais) from the mid-eighteenth century, which encompasses all the documentation between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries.