A research team from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) has discovered in the Soria town of Deza a Roman camp and the Celtiberian city of Titiakos, which have gone unnoticed for more than 2,000 years and were predictably created for their inhabitants to settle. defended during the Sertorian Wars from Pompey, who eventually won the civil war in Rome. A limestone quarry has also been found that was exploited "quickly and in one go" for the construction of this large military camp, they indicate from the Polytechnic in a statement.
The research, recently published in the Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences journal, has been carried out in the town of Deza (Soria) by a team from the Department of Engineering and Terrain Morphology of the Higher Technical School of Civil Engineers, Canals and Ports of the UPM, along with another team from the Public Works Heritage Department of Civil Engineering.
Until now, all these archaeological sites were unknown, which have been recently detected thanks to the comparison in aerial photography of the geomorphology of the slopes of this gorge with the snouts of the rest of the streams that cross the plateau of the foot of the Sierra de My grandmother.
All the snouts present an identical relief, with very regular slopes up to an erosion surface, except this one, which had relatively large cavities on its left slope at its exit, with sections of a path excavated in rock and with ruts due to the passage of wagons that accessed the quarry from the upstream part of the hocecilla.
They are "easily identifiable" sections that end in a 40-meter precipice where there is a large 2.5-ton stone block, visible from the town and "surrounded by mystery, since it was not understood why it had been built", since The route did not go to the city of Titiakos, but went up "inexplicably" and with gentle slopes, traveling about 700 meters upstream of the gorge until it reached the highlands.
The professor who has led this research, Eugenio Sanz, explains that the exploitation has gone "totally unnoticed" because the place and the rock "are naturalized in such a way that, after more than 2,000 years, the fronts of the quarry passed for being natural features of the land. He adds that this military camp was predictably intended to protect the Celtiberian-Roman city from its "most vulnerable" side.
As for military engineering, the professor points out that the construction was "very well done", since the areas for extracting large and small stone blocks are differentiated, depending on the needs of the work.
Sanz concludes that some 12,000 cubic meters of limestone were extracted from this quarry, corresponding to the volume and type of rock of the remains of the walls that are still preserved in situ, and of the reused stone boundaries of the farms of the around.
