RAURANUM
(Rom) Deux-sèvres, France.
An important Gallo-Roman settlement on the ancient
Poitiers-Saintes road (
Peutinger Table and
Antonine
Itinerary), and at the junction of roads from Nantes,
Limoges, and Périgueux. Ausonius had a villa here. Some
scattered finds made in the 19th c. drew attention to the
site: milestones of Tetricus and Tacitus, a cippus from
the Gallo-Roman cemetery, etc. These monuments are
in the Musée des Antiquaires de l'Ouest at Poitiers.
In 1887 excavations on the boundary of the present
village, toward the Couhé road, uncovered the Gallo-Roman substructures of a rectangular building with a
number of rooms, two of them with hypocausts. Galleries
ran all around the complex. Some meters from the
praefurnium in one of the rooms was a well (1.8 m in
diameter and 20 m deep) from which a set of leaden
tablets were recovered. One of them (ca. 9 x 7 cm) had
on each side a Celtic inscription in a cursive Latin script.
It is an imprecation tablet and is now in the Musée de
Saint-Germain.
In 1898 what may be the remains of a civic basilica
built at the crossroads were found in the area known as
Tresvées just outside the settlement, at the junction of
three Roman roads. The archaeologists' plan shows a
rectangular building (73 x 44 m) with a 23 m semicircular apse on its N side.
In Merovingian times a huge cemetery was created
in the ruins of the Roman city. The sarcophagi are said
sometimes to lie three deep, especially around the church.
They are usually trapezoidal, and their lids are generally
decorated with a band with three cross-bars. Some 5th-7th c. funerary inscriptions have been found.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
J. Berthelé,
Antiquités gallo-romaines
et mérovingiennes trouvées à Rom, Deux-sèvres (1883);
C. Jullian, “Les fouilles de M. Blumereau, à Rom,”
Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de France 58 (1899); A. Grenier,
Manuel d'archéologie gallo-romaine,
III (1958); for the Celtic tablets see C. Jullian,
Revue
Celtique (April 1898); E. Nicholson,
The Language of
Continental Picts (1900); id.,
Zeitschr. I. cel. Phil. 3
(1901); J. Rhys,
The Celtic Inscriptions of France and
Italy (1906); Abbé Chapeau,
Bulletin des Antiquaires
de l'Ouest (1924); O. Haas,
Bulletin des Antiquaires de
l'Ouest (1961).
J. C. PAPINOT
