Abstract:

The Roman city of Aeso is one of the main urban sites founded by the Romans in NE Iberian Peninsula (1st century BC). In 2019, Aeso was declared a Cultural Asset of National Interest (BCIN, Catalan acronym) by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government), classed as archaeological area. The BCIN declaration is the maximum protection given by the Catalan Law of Cultural Heritage to sites and monuments, which involves an amendment to the owner’s rights and imposes inexorable duties; this is the reason why the competent public administration must define reasonably and specifically the limits for the BCIN. Roman Aeso comprises several archaeological sites whose study, over the years, has produced a large volume of historical, archaeological and bibliographic data sets of huge complexity. The present paper is based on the work carried out on the Aeso archaeological site by the Catalan Archaeological and Palaeontological Service during 2017-2018. The tasks were first aimed to elaborate the declaration file. Accordingly, several in-depth studies were afterward carried out putting forward, as a result, new decisive hypotheses for the progress of the scientific knowledge on Roman Aeso.