A quarry for the construction of a Roman camp next to the Celtiberian city of Deza during the Sertorian Wars (Soria, Spain)

Abstract

Through an interdisciplinary investigation, a hastily exploited individual quarry of limestone is studied. The quarry was made all at once for the construction of a nearby military camp to improve the defence of a remarkable Celtiberian city during the Sertorian Wars. This is a perfect Roman military engineering project: on the one hand, the geological deposit was exploited selectively, differentiating the areas of extraction of large and small blocks of stone, according to the needs of the work. On the other hand, the material was transported by means of small roads along a carefully studied and laid out road of about 600 m in length and of clear Roman origin. The archaeological evidence shows the existence of a large camp that, according to previous surveys, adopts the known classical models of rectangular plans and the typology of Roman construction. In the camp environment, there are enough scattered remains that seem to point to a battlefield. All this indicates the importance of the primitive Celtiberian settlement, which is justified by an analysis of the territory by the existence of springs of high guarantee for human water supply, livestock and irrigation. The existence of silver mines is another added economic value. Due to the predominance in the monetary findings of the mint of Titiakos, the possibility is raised that the Celtiberian city was linked to the ethnic group of the Titos indicating their active participation during the Sertorian Wars.