In the northeast corner of the Upper Agora, the team supervised by Peter Talloen and Ine Jacobs (both KULeuven) has been working in the area immediately south of the shop complex within the colonnaded street. We've exposed a north-south structure (about 3.80 m) consisting of mortared rubble walls covered by a now-collapsed barrel vault. The structure's shape and its position in relation to the adjacent floor level lead us to believe it was a cistern. We had to stop excavating in this part of the trench for safety reasons, so we'll have to wait until the next campaign for an answer.

This week we also removed two destruction layers inside the second of the arched back rooms immediately south of the northeast gate. We found a doorway in the southern wall of the room below the second series of brick and tuffo block arches separating the row of (work)shops from the portico south of it. One of the layers was rich in ceramic and bone material dating to the sixth century A.D. and a coin dating to the fifth century A.D.

We removed two debris layers in room 3, part of the corridor or portico in front of the row of shops at the back of the complex. These were rather poor in finds except for a circular marble plate and small fragments of the northeast honorific column (see August 10-16). The upper column drum of this middle-Augustan monument (height more than 11 m), its beautifully preserved Corinthian capital, and the socle molding decorated with palmettes were removed by crane and reassembled on a nearby concrete platform.