Abstract:

Research over the last decades have focused on several isolated ‘turriform’ structures, traditionally attributed by historiography to the Roman period. A series of these features identified today in Catalonia are categorised under the expression ‘the problematics of isolated circular floor plan towers’. This study offers new data regarding one case, the Torre de les Gunyoles. that presumably falls into the broad chronological framework spanning the Late Republican Roman period to the establishment of the Caliphate in the Iberian Peninsula. The feature may have either played a military role, or as is more commonly believed, have served as a funerary mausoleum during the High Imperial period. In an attempt to resolve this problem of interpretation, the current study has turned to the discipline of the Archaeology of Architecture and updated the monument’s graphic documentation by means of new archaeological recording technologies such as digital photogrammetry.