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ROANNE (Town) LOIRE
Rodumna (Roanne) Loire, France.
A trading city at the head of navigation on the Loire. Goods came from the Rhone
valley and the Mediterranean to be sent N and W. Mentioned by Ptolemy and the
Peutinger Table, it is cited as a city of the Segusiavi. The rise of this town
of merchants, fishermen, and potters dates from the first half of the 1st c. A.D.;
it started to decline at the end of the century, probably owing to competition
from Lezoux, whose products were sold directly through the Allier valley.
Through excavations on the city boundaries we know roughly the area
it covered, N-S between the Boulevard de Belgique and the Rue de Cadore and E-W
between the Loire and the swamps that lay this side of the section where the railroad
station is today. Thus the city extended along the road from Augustodunum (Autun)
to Augustonemetum (Chermont-Ferrand). Its center was probably in the modern De
la Livatte quarter, where many remains have been located.
Excavations in 1902 on the site of the College Saint-Paul (formerly
Saint-Joseph) uncovered a graceful bronze statuette of Minerva and a fine bronze
fibula. The site was again explored in 1962-68 and ancient rubbish pockets were
found, similar to those discovered in 1958 on the site of the Nouvelle Poste.
The original use of these pockets, shaped like funnels or vats with vertical sides
and varying in depth (from 0.6 to over 2 m), is still an enigma. The walls of
some are hard and brownish, showing that they were used as hearths or rudimentary
furnaces. Two had ultimately been used to store clay, rolled into loaves. Among
the rubbish were found Gallic coins from the late Republican and Augustan eras,
fibulas of Iron Age II and III and the beginning of our era, objects of bronze,
iron, and glass, and andirons. There was also a tremendous amount of pottery:
from S Gaul, Campanian A, B, and C, Aco ware, Italic amphorae, and local pottery
painted in a characteristic and original manner.
In the 1st c. the city produced great quantities of local pottery
of Forez and Roannais clay, remarkable for the variety of its shapes, the texture
of the paste, and the quality of its decoration. No less than 37 different shapes
have been counted, divisible into four groups: vases shaped hike an egg or a truncated
cone, goblets, carinated bowls, and bowl-shaped vases known as Roanne vases. The
forms range from slender pedestaled vases to low ones. The paste is sometimes
delicate, light gray with a darker glaze, sometimes coarse, but some fine pieces
vary in color from light yellow to brick red. The patterns, predominantly geometric,
may be impressed, engraved, or painted.
Only one inscription has been found, an epitaph discovered in 1820
near the Werle barracks. Few of the monuments have survived: what may be the remains
of baths are near the Place du Chateau, some potters' kilns are near the Ecole
de Musique in the Rue de Cadore. The kilns are 2 m down (covered by a Merovingian
necropolis, 6th-7th c.). Pottery found in these kilns is principally everyday
ware made of coarse clay; there are no painted vases. Built in the second half
of the 1st c., these ovens ceased to be active before the end of the 2d c.; production
had become heavy and industrialized before it disappeared.
In 1967-69 several houses in the Rue Gilbertes, in the heart of the
Gallo-Roman settlement, yielded many small objects, coins and potsherds. Five
strata could be identified, from the 1st c. B.C. (Campanian B and C, local ware,
coins of the Segusiavi) to the 3d c. A.D. (everyday pottery, a denarius of Gordianus
III). One house, built in the period of Tiberius-Claudius and modified in the
2d c., was apparently abandoned ca. 160-180.
At least two necropoleis have been located. One, excavated in 1893
in the Rue Benoit-Malon, held mainly cremation tombs. Four types of urns were
listed: a limestone chest, a lead cylinder inside a copper-bound barrel, a gray
clay vase with wavy decoration, and a simple amphora base. But inhumation was
also practiced: a wooden coffin was identified by its nails. Among the finds were
some statuettes of white terracotta from the workshops of the Allier valley, cast
figurines usually representing Venus Anadyomene. In 1873 another necropolis was
discovered in the Rue Anatole France; in it were a sarcophagus made of large bricks
and several cremation urns.
The collections of Joseph Dechelette, a specialist in Gallo-Roman
pottery, are housed in a museum named for him; it also has finds from the excavations.
A little museum has been set up near the potters' kilns in the Rue de Cadore.
M. Leglay, ed.
This text is from: The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites,
Princeton University Press 1976. Cited Feb 2006 from
Perseus Project URL below, which contains bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
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