The Forum Hadriani Excavation
Reuvens would lead the first professional excavation in the Netherlands. The excavating of the Forum Hadriani began in 1827, and would end early in the 1830s. The whole project was tainted by bad weather and budgetary problems, but Reuvens demonstrated meticulous registration methods and invented techniques for field archaeology along the way.
Reuvens, his family and two of his students temporary moved in to the country house on the bought land. He organized tours and hired locals for menial tasks. All sorts of objects were discovered on the site, including coins, sherds of pottery, jewelry, a bronze statuette of a dog and even human remains.
Correspondence of the time shows Reuvens constantly trying to persuade the government of the value of excavating. When Belgium seceded from the kingdom in 1830 archaeology was the last thing the treasury could indulge, and eventually the estate was sold. The result of the project was unsatisfactory, though it had been the first professional field archaeology conducted in the Netherlands.
Read more about this topic: Caspar Reuvens
Famous quotes containing the word forum:
“That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)