Excavation of the Roman City of Pollèntia

Quintus Caecilius Metellus founded Pollèntia as a strategic Roman outpost on the Balearic Island of Mallorca in 123 BCE. By the third century CE, Pollèntia had become a major urban colonia with an area of about 20 hectares. Infrastructure included housing, a forum containing temples and a market, a theater, and advanced systems for delivering drinking water and removing sewage. Three extant excavations open to the public include the residential area of La Portella (Sa Portella), including the House of the Two Treasures and the House of the Bronze Head; the Forum and its Tuscan-style Capitolium temple, two minor temples, and the tabernae or commercial areas; and the Roman theater at the outskirts of Pollèntia. Note: the city is oriented along a roughly north-south line; in the map above, north is to the right.

While accidental finds of Roman artifacts have been reported from the 1500s, modern excavations have occurred in three periods: the work begun in 1923 by Llabres Quintana was ended by the Spanish Civil War; the graves unearthed in this state funded excavation in the necropolis at the southern end of Pollèntia were covered and remain so today (one of the UP assignments is to find those graves as a reference for additional excavation of the necropolis). In the 1950s, the Bryant Foundation funded excavation of the Roman theater and and a building adjoining the necropolis that archaeologists Almagro and Amorós described as a presbyterium. Bryant-funded excavations continued through the 1970s.

Current excavations in the Forum and at nearby Santa Ana Chapel are administered by the Roman City of Pollèntia Consortium, a collaboration of the Balearic Government, the Consell de Mallorca, and the Alcúdia Town Council. Directors of the Consortium and the hosts for the UP Pollèntia Team are Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros, Ph.D., Professor of Archaeology, University of Bacelona; and Esther Chávez Álvarez, Ph.D., Professor of Archaeology at the University of La Laguna on the Canary Island of Tenerife.

Dr Cau, Dr. Chávez, and Fr. Richard Rutherford, CSC, Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Portland, are particularly interested in the Roman necropolis, the presbyterium uncovered in the 1950s (is that structure a Christian basilica? if not, where is the basilica?), and any associated Christian structures such as a baptistery that might be situated near that building. Some of the graves uncovered in the 1920s appear to date from Christian antiquity, as artifacts recovered from the crypts include a gold signet ring with a stone with carved Christian symbols of an anchor, two fishes, and a cross.

Photo credits this page: Ronda Bard and Jacob Bard (panorama)