Abstract:

Within the framework of the research developed initially by the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) and currently in collaboration with the Institut Català d’Arqueologia Clàssica (ICAC) by a multidisciplinary team of geologists, archaeologists and art historians, numerous data have been collected on the exploitation, use and dispersion of ornamental stone in Roman Spain and especially in its northeastern sector (modern Catalonia). In this paper, we want to put forward the importance of a comprehensive, all-embracing study that includes not only the final item (objects, inscriptions, sculpture) but also the identification of the quarries and the geological layers from where the stone was extracted as well as the geological characterisation of the material for its correct identification and to understand the particularities that its work (extraction and carving) involved. To do so, we take as illustrative cases the ones of two of the main ornamental stones exploited in the northeast of Hispania: broccatello, also called jaspi de la Cinta, from Dertosa (modern Tortosa), and the Santa Tecla stone, from Tarraco (modern Tarragona). We will insist on the fact that the lithological, aesthetic, symbolic aspects as well as its location are strongly interwoven and that this is key to understand their differentiated use and the different scopes of the diffusion (Mediterranean and regional, respectively) that had each these stones.