A late antique rural community in Mérida: the site of Casa Herrera

Abstract

This paper presents the contextualized results of the latest excavations at the site of Casa Herrera (Mérida, Spain), one of the best examples of late antique sites in the Iberian Peninsula, not only because of the degree of preservation of the site, but also because its long chronological sequence, which runs from the first to the ninth centuries. The excavations of the surroundings of the funerary basilica and the Roman aqueduct have unearthed the remains of a handful of buildings that could be linked to a rural monastic community of late Roman and Visigothic chronology. The site has an Umayyad phase where settlement clusters around the basilica before being finally abandoned during the ninth century