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:
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)