Baelo Claudia, a Roman city in Betica

Baelo Claudia, a Roman city in Betica
The ancient settlement of Baelo is located in the bay of Bolonia, in the heart of the Strait of Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, in the territory of the present-day municipality of Tarifa (province of Cadiz, Andalusia). Strabo mentions that during the Empire it was the main port of embarkation for Tangiers, as well as an important centre for the production of salted fish (Geography, III, 1-8). Its remains occupy an area of about ten hectares within the city. The first occupations in the bay date back to the 2nd century BC, but the first real settlement probably dates from the Augustan period (Sillières 1995, 53). This small Betic city probably obtained the privileged status of a Roman municipality during the reign of Claudius. From this date onwards, the city was endowed with a new monumental ornament (Fig. 1). In the 3rd century, traces of ruins of the earlier buildings, probably due to an earthquake, were found. The city was then transformed but did not disappear, and the occupation continued long after the end of the Roman provincial administration in Hispania, until the end of the 6th century or even the beginning of the 7th century AD, at the heart of the Visigothic period, when it was definitively abandoned. Its abandonment at the beginning of the 7th century allowed for a good preservation of the ancient city, which makes it an essential milestone in our knowledge of the urbanism of the Roman cities of the Iberian Peninsula, and of the Roman West.

Baelo Claudia's archives: general presentation

With an interdisciplinary approach and an international dimension, the ArchivesBaelo project aims to preserve, archive, digitise and enhance the French archaeological documentation produced between 1917 and 2017 by researchers linked to the Casa de Velázquez (Madrid), on the ancient site of Baelo (Tarifa, Cadiz). The idea is to bring together documents that are currently dispersed in different collections in a single digital database, in order to create a pool of scientific data. The archive collections held at Casa de Velázquez and the Institute for Research on Ancient Architecture (Pau) are made up of a wide variety of paper items that represent eight linear metres. The tasks are: to integrate the new deposits, to continue and finalise the digitisation of the collections held by French institutions, to recover and format the metadata of the Spanish institutions, to deposit the digitised files in Nakala, to make a research tool available to researchers and the public in AtoM and, in parallel, to develop a bilingual digital platform to edit all the archaeological documentation of the Baelo site. At the end of the programme (by 2022), the objective is to integrate this corpus into the "excavation sites" section of the future Perseid of the French Schools abroad.