Marble and stone revetment and pavements: Context and provenance

Abstract

Earlier excavations and survey at Vagnari furnished hardly any evidence for the use of marble at the site, and so the vicus was considered to be a low status settlement, with only a few rooms having been elegant enough to decorate them with marble floors or revetment. The fragments recovered were not analysed scientifically to determine the location of the quarries from which the marbles came. Of particular interest, however, were two small fragments of inscriptions on white marble retrieved from the rubble fill dumped in the 4th century AD in the reservoir. These originally may have been attached, when intact, to votive or funerary monuments, suggesting that the occasional commemorative monument was set up in the vicus and its cemetery, but they have little bearing here on the use of marble for architectural purposes. From 2012, considerably more marble was found that had been used in cladding and pavements, and these fragments were subjected to a geochemical and petrographic analysis.