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Bronze Age village found near ancient Roman city

A 3,500-year-old settlement has been unearthed near an ancient Roman city in northeast Italy.

Bronze Age village found near ancient Roman city
A wall at a Bronze Age settlement unearthed near the Roman city of Aquileia. Photo: Archaeological Superintendency Friuli

The Roman city of Aquileia, in Friuli Venezia Giulia, is one of Italy's 51 world heritage sites but the discovery of a Bronze Age village just outside the city has cast new light on the area's human history, Corriere della Sera reported.

The village was found next to an ancient Roman canal, known as the Canale Anfora, by a team of archaeologists from the University of Udine.

From 200BC until 400AD Aquileia – today home to just 3,500 inhabitants – was one of the biggest and most important market towns in Europe, with a population of some 100,000.

Much is known about the town's Roman origins, which now stretch back even further.

Archaeologists were first alerted to the possible existence of an earlier “protosettlement” after carrying out a geophysical scan in 1980, but had to wait until 2013 before excavations could get underway.

The excavations, which concluded in December, have revealed the remains of a Bronze Age village which had area of 100,000 square metres.

Among the findings were the foundations of several buildings made from gravel and stone – once the walls of Bronze Age homes.

The digs also unearthed a series of open hearths, which were used for cooking and manufacturing goods.  

Numerous fragments of pottery and other household items such as rudimentary spindles we also found.

“The objects provide important information about the villagers' lifestyle and reveal much about ways in which people came together,” Elisabetta Borgna, who led the excavation, told Corriere.

Based on the artefacts found at the site, experts say the settlement existed for some 300 years between 1500BC and 1200BC, during which time it is thought to have been a key trading point – much like the later Roman town on Aquileia – which followed it.

“We think that during the middle Bronze Age the villagers got together with other groups from nearby settlements on convivial occasions, when trade would take place,” Borgna said.

The discovery represents another tantalizing challenge for archaeologists in the region, who have until now only excavated a fraction of the ancient Aquileia.

Research has now moved out of the field and into the laboratories at the University of Udine, where fragments of organic matter found at the site are being analyzed to try to discover how the villagers ate.

The numerous samples of pottery are also being analyzed and accurately dated in a bid to reveal more information about the cultural exchanges which were taking place, 1,000 years before the Roman colony was founded.

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TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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