Listed 1 sub titles with search on: Information about the place for destination: "ANNECY Town HAUTE SAVOIE".
Boutae (Annecy-Les-Fins) Haute-Savoie, France.
A small Allobrogian settlement at the outlet of an Alpine valley. It developed
into a Gallo-Roman vicus of the city of Vienne under Augustus, when construction
of the route from the Little St. Bernard Pass to Geneva began (completed under
Claudius by a road linking it to Aix). The center of many industries, Boutae reached
its apogee in the 2d c. Destroyed in the 3d c. by the German invasions, it recovered
somewhat under Constantine but was conquered by the Burgundians in the 5th c.
At its height, the vicus covered a triangular area of 25 ha, the base
of the triangle corresponding to the modern Avenue de Geneve. Three cardines running
NE-SW were crossed by the decumani, marking off regular insulae. In the N section
of the settlement, where the N decumanus crossed the W cardo, was the forum, which
was paved, first under Hadrian and twice thereafter, and surrounded by porticos.
Close by on the NE side is a rectangular building (46 x 22 m) uncovered in 1959-66;
inside it is a peripheral portico 3.7 m wide with a wall of mortared rubble faced
with small blocks; the portico encloses a hall with a nave (35 x 11 m). A rectangular
room (9 x 6 m) with a tiled floor extends into the axis of the long N side facing
the forum; thls has been ldentified as the curia of the vicani Boutenses (CIL
XII, 2532). On either side of the curia, in an unusual arrangement, is a semicircular
exedra. The dimensions of the building, the strength of its foundations, its location
on the edge of the forum, and the absence of domestic pottery all suggest that
it may be the [basi]lica cum p[orticibus] mentioned in an inscription (CIL XII,
2533), a dedication dating from the reign of two emperors, perhaps Marcus Aurelius
and Lucius Verus.
In the same N section of the vicus several houses have been found:
the House of the Gold Coins, the House of the Galleries, the House of the Columns,
and the Double House; farther S are the Hypocaust House and the House of the Fresco.
A number of workshops have also been located.
To the SE are a temple attributed to Mercury and, close by it, a little
theater, recognized by a fragmentary inscription (CIL XII, 2539) and by the discovery
of some curved tiers at the edge of an open area that had sometimes been thought
to be a second forum. Several pottery strata, S of the theater, have yielded quantities
of potsherds from different workshops; this S section of Boutae seems to have
been mainly industrial in character.
A peculiarity of this vicus is that it got its water supply not from
an aqueduct but from wells; some 40 have been located.
At the W end of the vicus on what is now the Boulevard de Rocade,
between the Avenue des Iles and the Avenue des Romains, is a large inhumation
necropolis that was used in Roman times and again in the Burgundian era.
Terraced on the neighboring hillsides are luxurious villas. A suburb
also grew up on the Thiou river around a port, indicated by the tiles frequently
unearthed in the center of the modern city of Annecy, around the Rue J. J. Rousseau.
Objects found on the site are housed in the Annecy museum.
M. Leglay, ed.
This text is from: The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites,
Princeton University Press 1976. Cited Jan 2006 from
Perseus Project URL below, which contains bibliography & interesting hyperlinks.
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