VENDEUVRE DU POITOU
(“Vindobriga”) Vienne,
France.
The township of Vendeuvre, 20 km N-NW of Poitiers, takes its name from a Gallic settlement
dating from before the Roman conquest. It overlooked it
to the E.
Surrounding the site, today called Tours Mirandes, are
remains from the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Ages,
as well as a prehistoric necropolis. The Gallo-Roman
substructures are enclosed in a rectangle of nearly 200
ha, stretching from Vendeuvre to Chéneché. This part of
the site was occupied from the 1st to the 5th c. A.D. It
was destroyed twice, in the barbarian invasions of 275
and 406, and finally abandoned in the Merovingian period.
The principal monuments are: a very curious religious
monument of Celtic origin; an adjoining basilica; a ritual
basin; a large forum; a theater in the Greek style designed
as a semicircle and stage. A road, probably the decumanus, has also been located, as well as the site of the baths, some insulae belonging to a commercial quarter and a residential section, some more roads, a necropolis,
and other large monuments on the outskirts.
The circular temple has a rotunda 33 m in diameter
and is ringed with an enormous stylobate wall. Its pronaos opens in the middle of a galleried facade that is
bordered to the W by a staircase 86 m long on the same
axis, leading to a ritual marble basin. This monument,
dated by a deposit found in situ below the foundations,
goes back to the end of the 1st c. A.D. It was richly decorated, as evidenced by the finding of some 40 varieties of marble and porphyry from every part of the empire, and ornaments and nails of bronze faced with gold or
silver. Fragments of a stele and an ex-voto would seem
to show that the building had a religious purpose.
About 15 m from the N side of the temple is an apsed
basilica (26 x 13 m) with a somewhat unusual heating
system consisting of underground galleries connected to
three praefurniae. This monument is of a type rarely encountered in Gaul.
On the line of the temple to the E is an immense
forum, slightly larger than the Forum of Trajan in Rome,
with a gallery along its E side. Along its axis is a series
of square pedestals, one of them 8 m square. It was paved
with flat stones.
The site of the baths have been located to the E. In
the same direction, 150 m away, is the theater, a huge
semicircle with tiers, 120 m in diameter, oriented S-SW
on a rectilinear stage. The seating capacity was more
than 5000. The inscription dedicating the theater mentions as donor a certain Nepos who was High Priest of Rome and Augustus.
Excavations, aerial photography, an electromagnetic
surveys have located an insula in a residential section S
of the forum, where a great street lined with houses can
be seen clearly. Among the houses is a villa in the Classical style, consisting of 21 rooms arranged around an atrium.
Aside from 140 m of well-preserved Roman walls S of
the forum, the buildings were either razed or buried below ground after the barbarian invasions of 276 and 406. They also suffered from Norman pillaging in the 9th c., and especially from medieaval exploitation of the large
blocks of stone.
The site is interesting on several counts. It contains a
complete, highly urbanized complex that served as a rural
meeting place for the inhabitants of a rich agricultural
region near the city of the Turones; the area was on an
ancient tin and amber route linking W central Gaul with
the mouth of the Loire, and a pre-Roman sanctuary was
lavishly enriched from the 1st c. A.D. on, especially under
Hadrian and the Antonines. As a political and commercial center, with its civil basilica and great forum, the site attracted the rural people from the surrounding area for meetings, festivals, pilgrimages, and markets throughout
the Pax Romana.
All the evidence indicates a peak of prosperity between
the beginning of the 2d c. A.D. and the first barbarian invasions—the techniques used in its architecture; the masonry of the walls; the absence of courses of brick; the beauty of the epigraphy, which has no abbreviations; the
fragments of sculpture, capitals, and parts of lions modeled in the round and portrayed larger than life size; the coins, and especially the pottery series. The settlement lasted, with difficulty, until the 4th c. when the coins and
late pottery become very rare. And the site, centered on
its ancient sanctuary, and especially the temple, apparently suffered systematic ideological destruction at the hands of the Christians from the time of St. Martin of Tours on.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gallia 23 (1965) 377-80
PI; 25 (1967)
267-70
I; 27 (1969) 284-88
PI; 29 (1971) 276
P; C. Potut,
Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de l'Ouest (1969); G. C. Picard,
RA (1970:1) 185ff
P.
C. E. POTUT
