DETERMINING THE LOCATION OF THE VILLA OF LUCIUS ARTORIUS CASTUS: RECOMMENDED COURSES OF ACTION

It has long been suspected that the maritime Roman villa of Lucius Artorius Castus must have lain at or adjacent to St. Martin’s Church in Podstrana. This is assuming, of course, that he possessed such a villa.  But this seems a quite reasonable conjecture and it is one that for the sake of argument I will subscribe to for the remainder of this paper.

To perform a sort of abbreviated comparative analysis, we may point to several maritime villas in the region that exhibit similar if not identical placements. The one only a dozen or so miles up the Croatian coast at Trogir may be taken as a model for the presumed villa of LAC. 

[From http://iansa.eu/papers/IANSA-2017-02-luznik.pdf]

As the LAC memorial stone is of significant size and weight and was haphazardly built into the roadside wall at the church, there is the strong likelihood that it had not been moved far from its original find spot. 

Having had only a cursory examination of the church and its cemetery, I can suggest only two non-invasive and low-to-zero cost investigatory techniques at present that might help us at least prove the existence of such a villa and, perhaps, come to some limited understanding of its plan and extent.  First, a thorough surface survey should be undertaken.  This should include canvassing the neighborhood surrounding the church and cemetery, both the private residences and the businesses.  Owners should be assured that no excavation work is planned, etc.  In other words, we must ease them of any concerns they might have regarding potential damage to their property or even inconvenience. Volunteers could be quickly trained to look for surface scatter, although emphasis should be placed on exterior and interior visual inspection of house foundations, crawl spaces and basements for Roman relics including stones or stone fragments, including additional sculptural or inscribed material incorporated into the modern sub-structures.  High-tech methods such as employing ground penetrating radar requires sufficient expenditure.  With funding lacking for novel approaches, the old-fashioned visual investigation technique may be preferable.

Second, while the hiring of a professional underwater archaeological team would required considerable expenditure, a local diving club might well be enlisted to search the sea bottom in the vicinity for anything that appears unnatural or might be indicative of sunken portions of the villa. As the known plans of some other maritime villas plainly show, sea level change has resulted in the loss of much of the structures. While this seems like a negative development, given that the land portion of the villa is, apparently, completely destroyed and/or buried, our only hope of actually finding existing columns, statues and the like may lie beneath the ocean.  These may still be recognizable, despite the corrosive quality of salt water and the deposition of sediments or growth of water weeds.  If we tell (or show) non-archaeological divers exactly what to look for, we might be surprised by the results.

In closing, I would also suggest we look very carefully all place-names in the area, whether extant or not. While this is a long-shot, we might reasonably wonder whether any place-name may betray an earlier Roman name for the villa.