Barcelona (EFE) Cathedral.
The excavated area, where archaeologists work following the instructions of both the Barcelona Archeology Service and the Generalitat’s Archaeological and Paleontological Heritage Service, is located in the space of one of the future flower beds where a tree will be placed.
This circumstance is what made it necessary to go deeper than the metro and it was when pavements from the 19th century were first found and later traces of medieval and Roman remains, which made it necessary to stop the work and start the archaeological work, explained the director of the archaeological intervention, Joan Garriga.
The two late-antique human remains, dating from approximately the 6th-7th centuries, are in good condition, while the Roman remains (4th-5th centuries) appear quite degraded, because the medieval walls cut them out.
The human remains will be the object of anthropological study
All human remains will be the subject of an anthropological study, which includes the determination of sex, approximate age, pathologies detected and the corresponding analytics.
No burials are detected due to ancient funeral rites, because, as Garriga has said, “in the beginnings of Christianity people were buried in a humble way because they thought that, after death, they should present themselves before God and, therefore, it does not appear grave goods”.
Garriga explains that “this concentration of graves in this area is normal, because here it is known that there was a high-value building occupied by a person who had a certain relevance in the city and when he was buried, the rest of the population wanted to bury themselves around of this character, which are the tombs now found”.
walls and wells
Archaeologists have found a dozen walls from different chronologies that overlap and configure various spaces of which, given the lack of associated materials, it does not seem that their use can be determined.
In addition to the walls, there has been a well from the 18th-19th centuries, a pilaster, some tiles, bricks or lime mortar pavements, a ceramic slab that covered a pot and three silos from the 9th-10th centuries; from the excavation of these silos, it has been possible to see that one cut through two tombs of Late Antique chronology.
All the archaeological remains will be documented and will be left in the same place except for the human remains, which will be analyzed by the Archeology Service, and some elements found in the place such as two fragments in which an I and an N can be read , of what could be a tombstone or an inscription from the Roman villa, which will be deposited at the Barcelona Institute of Culture to be studied.