Recherche par auteur > Alejandro Muñiz García

Colonia Patricia Corduba, caput provinciae bético, is the only one of the Hispanic provincial capitals for which there is no monographic study on Roman domestic architecture. As has been demonstrated from studies of public architecture, Corduba reproduces the urban planning models of the Urbs, with Rome being the generator of the residential types imitated in the provinces. For this reason, we are carrying out an in-depth study on domestic architecture, both in the inner city area and its vici, which represents a total of more than eighty homes, thus being able to determine foreign influences and native patterns in the modus vivendi Cordubensis.

In this proposal we present an approach to the problems of residential types in Roman Córdoba, focusing especially on open spaces and distribution in the form of peristyles and patios. We present the first GIS (Geographic Information System), where through different applications and computer programs we are creating a map of Corduba, inserting in turn all the structures belonging to the private and domestic sphere, thus configuring the best approximation of what the city would be like Roman of Córdoba.

To take into account are some of the difficulties that we encounter in these types of investigations that focus above all on the urban and more central areas of modern cities, where the superposition of structures in different periods is the common trend. Furthermore, until recently, archaeological activities were “rescue” excavations; Furthermore, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the most normal form of excavation was the carrying out of small archaeological surveys carried out within the plots, and the results of which provided us with small “windows” into the history and archeology of the remains there. found. This means that we do not have results of a complete house from the Roman period, seriously hampering the study of domestic architecture.

However, despite these problems in the research, the analysis and study are giving good results and some conclusions can be drawn, still preliminary, but very significant. We observe how the general technique of private architecture undergoes a gradual evolution from the republican period to late antiquity, where housing, as usually occurs in the Roman and Mediterranean world in general, is articulated and organized around open spaces: atriums-peristiles. -patios. This evolution is further confirmed when this same space is reused with its same functionality in different historical stages, finding in the same space a republican atrium, followed by a high-imperial peristyle, and finally a courtyard in medieval times. Thus, here we want to present some examples of these homes that are structured around patios, which evolve, but without ceasing to be the very heart of the home.