2,000-year-old Roman sites uncovered, ‘hidden empire’ to unlock secrets

These 57 sites could potentially reshape our understanding of the Romans or, at the very least, expand our current knowledge by revealing a new facet of their civilization.

A whole new empire

Although a few of these sites had first been identified in the 1980s and 1990s, this area in Southern Spain had not been investigated until 2023. The team from Cádiz set out into the countryside of Spain to begin their “intense excavation” at the Roman villa of El Cañuelo in Bornos.

Their aim was to understand “the interaction between the Bay of Cádiz and the settlements in the Guadalete River depression during the Roman period.” However, they never anticipated finding a network of sites likely interconnected by trade and communication routes along the Guadelete River.

The state-of-the-art tools employed in this remarkable discovery include multispectral cameras and LiDAR technology. LiDAR, which has been instrumental in numerous groundbreaking archaeological discoveries in recent years, detects underground objects using pulsing radar.

These separate settlements might point to “a hidden empire” or, at least, a hidden part of the Roman empire that archaeologists didn’t know about until now, as reported by Express UK.

What’s next for the “hidden empire?”

The researchers wanted to delve into the Roman Empire’s presence in the Guadelete River valley over 2,000 years ago, a period shrouded in mystery. The Romans supposedly integrated this region into their empire upon conquering Spain in 264 BC, as reported by the Independent, but the 57 structures just unearthed have not been dated yet.

Based on historical knowledge, they estimate the sites to be at least 2,000 years old. Their distribution across several areas—Arcos de la Frontera, Bornos, Villamartin, and Puerto Serrano—suggests they might be part of a “hidden empire,” though further investigation is necessary to confirm the nature of this remarkable conglomerate of settlements, though it appears to be Roman.

As archaeology stands to gain deeper insights into this period of Roman history in Spain, the primary objective moving forward is to “carry out excavations and surveys with non-traditional techniques and tools that will be completed with the study of the contexts found, as well as analyze techniques on the documented materials that will allow us to obtain a holistic vision of the Roman settlement and the territory in the area around the Bornos and Arcos de la Frontera reservoirs,” Express UK concludes.