Furfo (Barisciano, AQ). Risultati della prima campagna di indagini non invasive del Furfo Project.

In September 2023 the first season of work was conducted by the Furfo Project, a new interdisciplinary study organised through a 3-year research agreement between the Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le Province di L’Aquila e Teramo, the University of Aquila – Department of Human Sciences, the British School at Rome and the Comune di Barisciano. The aim of the research programme is the investigation of the vicus of Furfo, an important archaeological site in the territory of Barisciano (L’Aquila, Abruzzo) located in the Aterno Valley along the via Claudia Nova. The vicus has been identified since at least the 1700’s thanks to its correspondence with the toponym of the area conserved by the church of Santa Maria di Farfona and with the ancient name conserved by the celebrated Lex Aedis Furfensis (CIL IX, 3513). More recently in the 1990s some fieldwalking was undertaken which proposed an estimated extent of the vicus. The first year of research of the new project saw the application of diverse types of non-invasive survey: fieldwalking, geophysical prospection (magnetometry) and LiDAR survey. The detailed analysis of each technique, and the combined synthesis of the overall results, allows a new reading of the topography and chronology of the site: a new understanding of the area occupied by the settlement has emerged, considerably more extensive and structured then previously hypothesised, and the complex topography of its long continuity of habitation attested by the material culture, from the ’Vestina’ to the medieval period.