 So today's speaker is Dr. Alejandro Paredo from Neusidad de Murcia in Spain. He is a post-doctoral researcher at that same university. He hails our from Cartagena, which is in the same region, that is, he'll be speaking today. He is a specialist in Roman ceramics. He's in fact here this semester working with me, helping us work out some issues about the fabrics and proveniences of some of the African amperes by which I mean from Libya to Egypt and Algeria and one of the projects that I've been working on for a while. They also see U.N. Jan here who's also worked on with us. He has been fortunate enough to get research appointments in all sorts of interesting places like Exxon-Prolance and in Rome and now here in Berkeley. He has done field work in Spain and North Africa and perhaps other places that I don't know about. I guess you don't have to know all about all of those. Today he's going to be speaking about his, I guess, what's his PhD research effectively, which is examining issues of the urban development of his native city, Cartagena, which is not to be confused with Cartagena and Columbia. Interestingly, of course, it's Roman Carthago Nova as we'll probably talk about, so New Carthage. But Carthage itself is Carthadasht in Munich, which means New City, so it's kind of New New City and I guess that Carthagena and Columbia thus is the New New New City. But he may be going into all that. I don't know. But the issue is interesting because when we're trying to look at aspects of municipal life and the Roman imperial period in many parts of the Roman Empire we enjoy abundant textual evidence and informative inscriptions, which informs quite a bit of municipal structures and personalities and things of that sort. But as we get into the later part of the Roman Empire, a little later part, the epigraphic habit in many places begins to wane and so a lot of the basic grist for your mill becomes less and less abundant, compelling us to shift from an historical archaeology to what becomes, in a sense, a prehistoric archaeology that points to view. And from looking at his abstract, I guess this is sort of one of the themes that Alejandro is going to develop in the top piece that I'm going to give you today, which is going to focus on how he is using Roman ceramics to evaluate these sorts of urban transformations in the city of Carthagena, Spain. So without further ado, I will turn it over to Alejandro for our attention. Thank you so much, Ted. First of all, I wanted to thank the ARF for this wonderful possibility of being here today with you and also to the assistants. I'm very happy to be able to share some of the results of my research with you. I also wanted to publicly thank Professor Ted Peña from the Roman Material Culture Laboratory for his kindness and help during this month, in which I've been visiting scholar here. And I also wanted to apologize for my English, which is still terrible. So in fact, I'm going to do something that I hate when I speak in public, which is to read, but I think it will be better for you and your ears, believe me. So I've prepared for you a very, very visual presentation, and I'm not going to insist too much on methodological aspects. I just want you to understand the work I've done in recent years in Cartagena, which is mainly based on the analysis of material culture of Roman times. So take this last baggy brown talk of the year as a relaxing trip into the archaeology of a city of the Roman Empire. Well, the Roman Cartagonova, nowadays Cartagena, where I was born, is a city located in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula in the region of Murcia. It's the same region where Charo, the popular actress, came from, which can give you an idea of why we have this common accent. So Cartagonova is located in the Roman province of Spaniac, Iteria, later Spaniac Taraconensis, in a strategic area very close to North Africa and on the road that links Cadiz and the Atlantic world to the Italian peninsula. Before we start, I'm going to give you some notions about the historical context of the city. Cartagena is officially founded in 227 B.C. by the Punix from Cartage, who called it Cartadas, the new city, and as Ted talked about before, Cartago is the new city, so Cartadas is like a new city, but then in Roman times will be Cartagonova, which is the new, new city. Theologically, it's not very... So it was founded by the family of Hannibal, and if you think on the Second Punic War, it was from here that the elephants go, by foot, to Rome. So the city is conquered by Rome by Scipio Africanus in 209 and will become Cartagonova. And it will begin its period of splendor. During the last centuries of the Republic and the 1st century AD, the city reached its maximum extension and its main public and private buildings were built. But at an undetermined moment from the end of the 1st century and during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, a series of problems began to appear. Abandonments, distractions... This is the subject I am going to talk to you about. In the late times, the city will recover thanks to a new provincial reorganization created by Emperor Diocletian and in Byzantine times, it will again have a predominant role in Western Mediterranean. So the territory of Cartagena is dry, desert-like in some areas, and with a rough coastline. So why found a city here? What were the resources of the territory? So basically three. First of all, the lead and silver mines. There are mines of Galena, a rock from which lead and silver are extracted, and they were very important in Punic and Roman times. At the end of the 19th century, they were exploited again, and here you can see on the left side the Roman ingots and the 19th century and 20th century ingots that are practically the same thing. Another essential factor is the harbor. It's one of the best, if not the best, in the Mediterranean. I'm not saying this because I'm from Cartagena, but because it has a large size which allows to host a military and a commercial fleet. In fact, classical authors use harbors in plural. Here you have to imagine the city that stood on that small peninsula. So it has a natural depth, like other ports in the Iberian Levant that need to be dredged. See how ocean liners dock directly even today. So in addition, it is naturally enclosed, protected from the winds by the mountains and by a small island, which is here at the entrance of the bay, Scombreras. This island and its surroundings were also important for the production of salted fish, which will be another of the riches of the city. Scombreras, in fact, take the name of the mackerel, Scombrus, that were fish there. But in addition to salted fish, an important resource will be a spartagras, which is a vegetable fever widely used that will give the city the name of cartagospartaria during late antiquity. It grows naturally throughout the territory and the classical authors tell us that it was very used for strings, for example for the navy, but presents the problem for us that its conservation in the archaeological record is very difficult, obviously. So it was also used for many everyday objects. On the left you have the modern ones and those are Roman guas and sandal, and this is like it's to keep water. They are conserved in the archaeological museum of Cartagena. So all these elements that I have mentioned help to understand the richness of the city, but we are also fortunate that Cartagena is one of the cities most cited by the classical authors between the end of the Republic and the first century AD. So even Polybius visits the city personally, leaving a precise topographical description that archaeology seems to confirm. If we take as reference another description that of Strabo, we can see that it speaks to us about the silver mines, the fish-soulting industry, the walls, the certifications, the lake which is in the north. You have to imagine the city as a little peninsula, it's like San Francisco in fact. So here you have a paleotropographical reconstruction of what the landscape would be like in antiquity, with this lacus in the north. And here is a current map of the city with some of the main archaeological remains. We have the theater, the amphitheater, many domes, the forum area, and here an idealized reconstruction of the city with the harbor and the theater, which is probably the best known Roman building in the city. The theater was built at the end of the 1st century BC by people linked to the exploitation of mines and with links to the imperial house too, families such as the Postumi and the uni. Here you have some main images of the building that has been excavated during 20 years at the end of the 20th century. And the museum was inaugurated in 2008. You have this inscription devoted to the family of Augustus. And another interesting building is the courier which is the seat of the municipal government as if we say the city hall. So among the elements that have helped to interpret it stand out its position in the forum and the design of its pathmen that could have been used to distribute the chairs of the local magistrates. So we also have the Acropolis area and the forum currently under excavation in the center of the city around the hill of El Molinete. It is so-called because there is a molino. Molino is a windmill in the top of the hill. You can see it here. So the results are being very spectacular. Here you see a building that has been defined as the ethereum building, probably a public space linked to a nearby temple. And you can see, for example, how the staircase that goes up to the first floor is still preserved. So here you have a 3D reconstruction of the floor plan of the building. And I show you also several, well, private domes that has been excavated for two Nadomius and still preserved in a little museum. So we reach the second century AD when what Elena Reath called in 1997 the abandonment layers of Cartagena appear. It is a series of abandonment and rubbish dams that were detected in various parts of the city and affected buildings of all kinds, including dwellings and civic spaces. And you could say, well, Alejandro, don't be dramatic. It's normal to find abandoned spaces in the city and that has nothing to do with the dynamism of the city. We can see things like this even in Berkeley today or in San Francisco. Okay, of course, but the problem is that we are not talking about a case or two, but more than 50 in the whole city. So these levels were formed by the collapse of urban structures, especially by the fall of the upper part of buildings or those more fragile structures such as adobe, as you can see here. I don't know if you call it adobe. So you see, for example, this is for two Nadomius. You have the lower part of the building built with stone, which is more resistant to the humidity and the upper part that will collapse. They have a characteristic orange color due to the adobe and they also include a lot of rubbish. So in some cases, these levels can exceed two meters in height. And here is an example of a deposit that completely collapsed a road. Here you have another example where you can see clearly these layers, you know, of abandonment. So the traditional hypothesis considered the possibility of an urban collapse from the end of the 1st century AD without explaining its causes, although it was raised that it could be due to an attack by the Maori Berber tribes from North Africa. So the recession would have lasted a very long period between the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. So how to study this period? From the middle of the 1st century AD, epigraphy decays and the references to classical authors disappear. The only possibility was to reanalyze the archaeological record and especially the pottery, which is the most abundant element in it. So for this purpose, I analyzed several excavations, but five sites in particular. I choose two types of buildings, public and private, to see if the same dynamic was observed and I also choose to work on all excavations. So the old excavations are complicated. The information is not always complete, but at the same time, it is a way of rescuing these works from oblivion. You have to know that in Spain, which is like a federal state, each region has the competencies in archaeology since the transition after Franco's death. So in cities like Cartagena, with 3,000 years of history, each excavation means new data, but many are not published and the work that is not published does not exist. So as far as methodology is concerned, I'll give you a few brief notes. I carried out a global analysis taking into account all the pottery categories of fineware, Zamfora, cookingware, and I had quantifications. I know that this may seem very normal to you or even naïve now, but in our case, which we began to develop a more systematic urban archaeology from the 80s, it's something that has not always been done. Last but not least, I worried that the data would be available to the reader so that he could make his own interpretations. So for example, if we are dating, I don't know, this layer on 1st century AD because we have this kind of amphora, and tomorrow we discover that the amphora is not from Spain, but from Algeria, and it's dated from the 4th century. We can correct and reanalyze the information, but it's important that the reader could make this kind of exercise. So the global vision is important because in the case of Roman ceramics, there are productions that have been studied since the end of the 19th century, such as terraced gelata or amphoras, which interested scholars more for their decoration or for having epigraphy. So less eye-catching productions have usually been less studied. The problem of specializing in one kind of pottery, as fine words, arises when we only have, for example, common pottery. So these tombs were dated between the 1st and the 3rd century AD, so over a period of 300 years. But the Empire, of course, was not the same in Augustus' time as it was in the Euclidians. Yes, that's Lincoln's. The United States is not those of Donald Trump. So chronological precision is one of the first things that pottery allowed us to nuance. I developed a typological and archeometrical approach to analyze and characterize this context, reviewing systematically the material. And this is very important. I always get scared when I see publications on Roman pottery in which not a single fragment is drawn. And it is essential to touch the material, and I'll give you three examples, pieces from different layers that come together. A published jar that was actually almost complete, it only had to be reconstructed, or Roman lamps that seemed to have no stem, but were actually marked. These are the same bottoms. So working conditions were very variable. I found it very tidy storehouse, other something less. I could even make new friends. But I think we have all faced a kind of problems in archeology. So let's look at a case of study. The abandonment of this site, adomus in the middle of the urban center, had been dated in the middle of the second century AD from some fine pottery. It's the highest street. But an analysis of all the productions allowed to move the day towards the end of the second century and the beginnings of the third century. So the analysis also made possible to understand the formation of the context, a damp that was formed quickly as shown by the fragments of different levels that stick together. You know that when we are digging in the field, sometimes we distinguish many colors and different textures, and we give a lot of levels, but it's later in the laboratory when we can reorder this information and see if it's a same phenomena or something that was produced just in the same moment. So the same phenomenon happens of the fortune adomus. The majority of the rubbish-damp context is made up of fine and cookingware. I will not give you many specific data, but it is interesting to point out, for example, the small number of amphorae, which are here, which are one of the pieces that most interest us archaeologists in tracing tree growths because they contain full stuff. And on the other hand, the high number of cookingwares from Africa is the middle. It is the 50% of the context. We chose this intense connection with the other shore of the Mediterranean. So by studying all these contexts, we come to have a precise view of the production that we're circulating at that time from dating in periods of two centuries, as the tomes I showed you before. We now date in periods of 25 or 30 years. So the same phenomenon as in previous cases can be found in the Roman theater or the Curia. The political heart of the city is abandoned and turned into a rubbish-damp at the end of the 2nd century AD. So notice how before becoming a garbage-damp, the building is systematically plundered. They tear up the marble and recover all the elements they can. So the pieces that you can see, they couldn't took it because they were under stones, but all the rest is systematically stolen. Even this, I don't know if you... This is an apartment in Opus Segninum and they even stole all the rest to make another constructions. But if we continue, we find another examples with a different chronology and in which the formation of the archaeological record is also different, the excavation of Quartus Santos Street. So this excavation documented a humble drilling from the 3rd century with a small kitchen built in a 1st century AD shop. It's a taberna. So in this case, the pottery context was complete. So that seems to say fragmented, but all the pieces could be reconstructed and presented traces of fire. So this is not obviously a context of abandonment but a destruction one. Here you can see them in detail and they are complete. So once the archaeological evidence had been reviewed, a new map could be made distinguishing between the abandonments at the end of the 2nd century and the destruction layers of the 2nd half of the 3rd century. So with this new data and knowing that this period of recession will not begin at the end of the 1st century AD, an attempt has been made to find an explanation contrasting it with the different historical events of the moment. So if we observe the historical facts with which it is possible to relate this decline of the city, we have the important cessation of meaning activity and political factors such as a civil war between two supporters to occupy the imperial throne, Claudio Albino and Septimius Severo. We know that the province supported Claudio Albino, who lost, and that could have had consequences. There could have been other factors such as the famous Antonin plague of which much has been said, although archeologically it is difficult to prove. But there are elements that we can rule out from this scheme. So for example in this period sources speak of two attacks by the Maori, these Berber tribes of North Africa that would have attacked the coast of Betica and probably Spain, Spain and Taraconensis of course. So there is nothing to draw such a conclusion from archeological evidence. If we look at the transformation of buildings, we do not see any phenomenon that can be related to a violent event. Look for example at the Augusteum. So these missing slabs are not because of the Maori. Take them or one by one, it is the habitants of the city themselves who are retreating into the harbour area and they are who are dismantling the buildings themselves. So more examples, we have more examples in the Fortuna Domius where from the end of the second century the spaces are divided, fire is made directly on the ground and there is a gradual degradation of the building until it is definitely abandoned. So the Atrium building near the Forum is now divided and the Atrium becomes a common courier and each of the large rooms is transformed into a private dwelling. So the evidence of the pottery context are close with all the data. For example, analysis of lead pollution in the bay that demonstrates the cessation of mining activity which drags the rest of the economy. It's around the second century AD. Commercial activity is also declining at this time as seemed to show the shipwrecks that falls from second century to the third one. And also political activity seems totally irrelevant in the city. If we look at the number of senators that the Hispanic provinces brought to Rome in the second century, we have two large groups. So we have Taraco in Hispanic Taraconensis which is the capital and we have Italica which is the city where the Emperor Triand was born and also the family of Emperor Adrian. None is known from Cartagena and that's very surprising. It could be thought that there is a displacement of the population from the city to the countryside but it is not true earlier either so the vast majority of rural establishments were also abandoned at the end of the second century AD. So the interpretation of these evidences is controversial and sometimes implies a conflict with epigraphy. For example, on one hand we have the last inscription from the third century dated in 235 and devoted to Julia Mamea, the mother of Emperor Alexander Severus which has been used to explain the vitality of the city institutions. But on the other hand we have the local Sennate, the Curia, which has become a dump since the end of the second century AD. So another example of this gradual degradation are the roads. Here you have an intervention that I made in the center of the city in which you can see how a white road from the first century AD becomes a narrow dirt road full of rubble in which two cars cannot circulate in the opposite direction. So the occupation of the city is not interrupted. Here you can see how a road is covered with earth and there are still traces of traffic through but under which conditions? So this is important to nuance because sometimes two ambiguous expressions such as transformation are used. And yes, of course everything is constantly transformed like the energy if you want but in this case a recession is observed at all levels. In the case of the third century the situation changes and we find a distraction layer in the second half of the century. Here we can speak for the third century of Heurban crisis. So using the word crisis as defined by Professor Gethal Feldi as a serious moment from which a sick person overcomes or dies. So a crisis is also something punctual. It cannot last a hundred years. So two hypotheses are proposed to explain these distractions in Cartagena. One is that of a possible earthquake. Several city buildings have a major collapse as the Augusteum. Or for example, like the Roman theater here on the left. So these are buildings built with the very powerful structures in Opus quadratum. So their collapse presents a peculiarity. The architectural elements are connected and oriented in the same way. Here you see an example from Bilo-Claudia in the Betica where you see this column affected by an earthquake too. You see the basilica and you see how all the elements are connected. And at the same time, all the faults are oriented in the same direction. You have to know that when an earthquake occurs the seismic wave sweeps the surface in the same direction. It is like the wave that is produced when a stone is thrown into the water. So here you can see the orientation of the faults of the walls in the city of Lorca where it is near from Cartagena where an earthquake happens in 2011. So here you can see the Augusteum again with this east-west orientation collapse and the Roman theater with the same orientation. But if you look carefully at this stratigraphy you could see a lack of previous maintenance. So I have already explained that since the end of the second century there was an abandonment of certain spaces. So this is much more evident in the case of the Augusteum. Here you see this column which is broken and displaced from its base and why it is broken and displaced is because this wall felt sorry and broke and displaced it. But why didn't it tear it down completely? Because a garbage dump cashed the fall. So before the possible earthquake the building already showed a significant deterioration. But there is another hypothesis. For the second century we have no evidence for an external attack but now it's possible to speak of a raid by barbaric people, the Franks, who we know came down from Germany and plundered Tarragona among other cities as attested by archaeology and great resources. So theories about this type of attack have varied a lot in recent years and as you know the history is like a pendulum and it's also subject to the facts of the present. So here I bring you two images that I like very much taken from the book of World Perkins. We have a barbarian represented before the World War II destroying and killing everything in his path with this red-eyed horse. But notice how this image changes with the construction of the European Union and the integration of the different countries. So barbarians are our friends. They are carrying on weapons but just like an adornment so look how they are happy and they smile to us. And of course they contribute to culturally enrich the empire. So this happy version, if you want, has been adopted to the point of denying any kind of violent action of the part of barbarian groups. Of course the destruction of a building such as the Atrium Building in the second half of the third century may be due to an accidental fire but all options must be considered. And we must not forget that the ancient world is a violent world. So in any case, whether they're barbarians or an earthquake, we are facing a phenomenon of widespread destruction that affects the entire city. So here is another view of the Atrium Building. In any case, where it is important is not so much the destruction itself but the fact that the city does not have the capacity to rebuild these or other buildings. Even possible items of value will not be recovered. So in conclusion in Cartagonova, the features that would define the late city were already visible in the Severan period in view of the terminus posquem established by the study of numerous pottery contexts. At that moment, the ancient colony suffered a deep recession that affected both its economy and its extension and unicum among the principal cities of Spain. So although its urban decay should not be associated with that of its municipal institutions, their functioning is difficult to assess, particularly when the main representative body, the Curia, had been abandoned since the last decades of the 2nd century AD. Some epigraphic discoveries as the inscription dedicated to Julia Mamea showed the continuity of civil life during this period but do not allow us to speak of urban vitality. There are a number of weighty arguments supporting the city's hypothetical decline. So the abandonment of important public and private spaces as well as of numerous farm in its territory or the sharp drop in its commercial and mining activities. So these changes were exacerbated by a violent phenomenon in the last half of the 3rd century, neither an earthquake nor a fire nor a Frankish ride can be ruled out, which far from bringing about ambiguous transformations led to the re-nation of most of the ancient colony. Leaving aside its nature, these are those episodes where the Cudegas to a situation that had first made itself felt at the end of the 2nd century AD, after which the city showed no signs of recovery like other Hispanic cities suffering episodic crises. The buildings that collapsed at the time were never repaired nor were the household effects buried inside them recuperated. So the urban perimeter of the city will be reduced at this time, marked by the appearance of tomes and will not be recovered until the 18th century. It would not be anted well into late antiquity, especially as from the 5th century AD, when the city reemerged under a different urban model, although without the relevance or size that it had during the high empire period. It had to look like this is some example from North Africa, more or less, in which you can see a new city totally different from the classical one and much more reduced from its original size. And for my part, this is all. If anyone is especially interested, I have some work published in a proper English and even the PhD book which is in the UC library, but in Spanish, unfortunately. So many thanks again and happy holidays to everyone. I hope you understand more or less. So it looks like they were scavenging and recycling the materials through major public buildings. And then you were saying that they shift them to one location, did they reuse these? We found a building where they were stocking the old material. And near Cartagena in Alicante, we have even a shipwreck with reused material. So we have to think in very organized people which is dismantling systemically these buildings. But they weren't using that to rest in the city or I mean there's not that much evidence of that. Yeah, but we have a little evidence but they are not doing public buildings or rich buildings, but we have more things like this for example, this new floor made with pieces of, you know, a column or marble slabs. But for the moment we don't have the evidence of important new building in 4th century or whatever. No, that's a great job. Yeah, thank you. The theater capacity for example, the theater is one of the bigger in Spain. It's between 6,000 and 7,000, more or less. But the problem is that we start thinking that the city, that the first century city, it's really over dimension. So we have the sensation that they built an enormous city but after the meaning of Christ they have no capacity to occupy all the space. So we have many necropolis but with not a lot of terms to calculate or to make demographic studies and we don't know really how many people could be. But because it's true that we see that after the 3rd century the city reduced. If you see, for example, the fires of 3rd century are only concentrated here because after the 2nd half of the 2nd century the city was concentrated between these two hills. But maybe there were more populations in this little space so I don't know, for example, when the Atrium building is divided into 4 houses this is occupied by more people, we don't know it. Is there a sense of where it's going? We have a lot of problems with these fish sauce products because classical authors talk a lot about this but we don't have evidence at least for the 1st centuries of the empire. For little antiquity, yes, we know that they are produced but not from 1st to 3rd century AD. And we don't know why. We are even thinking about another containers in wood maybe or because they did show barrels for sardines and not in Cartagena but in the north of Spain. And classical authors say that Garum from Cartagena is one of the most expensive in the empire so maybe they were in little containers Channel number 5 is not in barrels because it's very expensive so maybe it's, I think it's Tito Livio who said that it cost 1,000 coins of silver for 8 or 9 liters so I don't know but I'm sure they have to produce even if they produce a special very high product they have to have a normal one so a standard production but for the moment we are not able to find it in the archaeological record. And turned into war in Centauré or is the glade being shipped somewhere? The ingots were shipped they worked the material in their mines and we have the ingots in many points of the empire from Algeria to Italy especially to Italy and the Bonifacio street so we know they passed between Sardinia and Cors to reach Rome. I notice you also have a note on the plate the question mark so I'm wondering if you could speak about the possibility of the plate about the what? Sorry? The plate The Antonin plate We know from the sources but this is something that it's well known especially for the oriental side of the empire that there is a plague so there is this kind of disease that provokes a lot of deaths in the empire and it is always cited as a possible element but we don't have tombs or deaths to analyse I don't know to make paleontological studies so yeah it's something that could be considered but for example if we look at chronicles from modern times we see that this kind of lake which is in the north of the city with the mosquitoes every September or every after summer we always have in 16th and 17th century a peak of deaths in the city caused by malaria and this kind of diseases but we don't know if a disease as the Antonin plaque that happened in the middle of the 2nd century could arrive to city as Cartagena it's true that it's a port which is connected with the rest of the Mediterranean it could be but for the moment we don't have any evidence of that Can you speak about what the evidence is and the regional minds for either continuity or decline in the intensity of production of metal in the 3rd century presumably when people are trying to account for this they must consider the role of mining mining is what does the archaeology show? because it generally declines in the 3rd century in Spain but the problem of mining are true so the data we have for the moment is thanks to this kind of analysis of the metal pollution in the bay as I saw before the mining were reactivated at the end of the 19th century so we thought that they were abandoned in Roman times because they were, how you say it they were empty or they were exhausted but in 1833 they find a new filon of metals so they start exploiting it again and they destroy all the Roman evidences so we unfortunately have a few little documents or information from mining activity in fact this kind of objects for example these these were found in mining galleries that they discovered in the 19th century and they are preserved, Cartagena is a very humid climate but in the galleries there are dry conditions and these kind of products were preserved but we almost have nothing about the mining production or the decline what is sure is that the city and the region have more resources so what happens with the other ones so with the spartagras or the fish salting or mining stops there are no other activities that could be exploited the only new wall which is built and we have the evidence is in the 6th century during Byzantine period we have an inscription where we know that he said he was rebuilt so there is a wall very well known from a republican time but we don't know if in the 3rd century effectively when the city reduced we have a new wall we don't know we don't know if the city has the capacity of building a new wall as you see it's very reduced we have a lot of problems we don't have any civic center for the 3rd, 4th and even 5th century and in theory we became new capital after the Euclidians reorganization but where is the governor and all the people who was with the governor and where are all these buildings and these spaces we don't have nothing so one explanation is that the power moves to other cities as for example Eilce with each city very close or even it's the moment in which it starts to move to the center of the country to Toledo who will be the next powerful city in the 5th century and it's still in the same province and we have very very few coins in the city it's really strange so it's for that that pottery is so important because no epigraphy and we have just isolated findings of coins that show us a circulation of people and give us some chronology but we can not even make studies about I don't know military people for example that came or things like that there are no wells for example in the next one not, not just one from the middle of the 3rd century in the Augusteum I think the last coin was from Bolusiano is 251 or something like this but it's a very isolated case it was a very nice presentation thank you I'm astonished by the absolute absence of senators of? senators senators, yeah of course which is a huge contrast with Taraco for example and I assume that if you extend this research to the equities it will be the same thing yes so in which I mean the number of senators and epithets is usually a sign of the landed wells you know the robust the landed areas of the city if you look at the cities of Apple Nancy for example for the 1st century the big ones and epithets and so on the one hand there's none of them none of senators and from your presentation it's clear that it's a highly romanized rich city it's not a huge city for example that's something and from just the ruins so I was wondering how should we account for this conference whether it's very strange at the first we thought maybe they promoted and they just they promoted to Rome or to other centers of power we could think too that maybe it's just that we didn't find the archeological remains or that the new city is a city which is still occupied I don't know that our remains get lost but if you look at little cities in the center as Segobriga this is from 2003 Segobriga is a very little town in the middle of Spain a city as Cartagena and we really don't know how to explain this phenomenon from the republican times we have the most important epigraphical collection of whole Spain and we have a lot of important names even these authors that visited the city the exploitation of the mines were linked with the imperial house even with Agrippa but we don't understand how all these families could just disappear at the end of the second century or the third Is there any evidence for continuity or discontinuity in the use of the harbor? The harbor is still used because it's the entrance not only of Cartagena but of all the province even until Segobriga, Toledo so it's still open but not for example if we saw the excavation of the harbor we have still potteries of this period but not in a massive quantity it's strange for example if you think in Cartagena in medieval times when Granada which is here is conquered by the Catholic kings how do you call it the sarcophage when someone dies the sarcophagus of the Catholic kings which is made in Carrara marble comes from Italy enters by Cartagena and goes until Granada and Cartagena at that time is 5,000 people town so it's like a little village but the harbor is still and we thought that maybe the taxes of the harbor it's one of the elements that allow the city to still be alive the key with us the key with us I didn't put you it's quite big it's very big I'm sorry I didn't put you I should put this not shadow so here you have Cartagena and the next important city you see this river is the Segura river actually so after the Tadda river you have Elce Iliqui which is another important city with a harbor Portus Iliquitanus but Cartagena controls all this territory until here you have modern that should depend on Cartagena so it's a huge territory called the Campus Spartarius for this is part so it's a very important region and this kind of Baetica the Oriental Baetica is like a deserted zone it's the main city in all the region and after the Eoclesian new division of the provinces of the empire in theory we are the capital of the Terraconensis was all of this so after when we became the province of Cartagena will be the capital of all this space so even the Balearian islands depend on us for the justice of this kind of question so Cartagena in theory rule over an enormous territory but it does not correspond with the archaeological reality at least for the end of the second century and the third century okay well thank you thank you so much