The Utica project is run jointly by the Tunisian Institut National du Patrimoine and the University of Oxford, in collaboration with the British School at Rome as a participant in the BSR Ports Project, and is co-directed by Nabil Kallala, Elizabeth Fentress, Josephine Quinn and Andrew Wilson. We are investigating the city’s urban development and economy through a combination of topographic survey, geophysics, coring, excavation, pottery studies and structural survey.
A geophysical survey was begun by Sophie Hay with a team from the British School at Rome, while trenches were opened in the northern edge of the site (Area I), the area of the basilica (Area II) and in the House of the Grande Oecus (Area III)). In Area II, a trench was laid out measuring 25 × 15m. which stretched, from north to south, across the exterior wall of the large structure (hereafter Building 1). Across the centre of the trench a concrete surface was cleaned and the various holes cut through it excavated, while work was begun on emptying the robber trenches of the main walls of the structure. Also in the northern end of the trench, particular attention was paid to cleaning and, in places, re-excavating an earlier sondage (hereafter Sondage A), probably made by Lézine, close to the north-west corner of the trench. South of 2002, meanwhile, an extensive area of post-Roman habitation was exposed, including at least three structures. Work was also begun removing the large deposit of earth that remained in the house of the Grande Oecus after the French excavations were abandoned in 1957. This was substantially disturbed by modern activity. The heavily damaged floor of the ‘Grande Oecus’ itself was cleaned and reburied