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MISC | Archaeology & Subways

19K views 31 replies 16 participants last post by  hkskyline 
#1 · (Edited)
Subway construction concerns archaeologists as it can endanger valuable remains from history. But the extensive underground digging can also be a great opportunity to excavate objects from the past, and displaying the excavated objects in subway stations is only straightforward.

I have a web page about this in the making and would like to ask if someone has more information or photos about the subject. There's also a list of stations with archaeological displays in them, maybe someone knows of more such stations?

This is the page: http://mic-ro.com/metro/archaeology.html

For example this is Syntagma station in Athens that displays many of the ancient artifacts excavated during construction of the metro:



I have also ordered the book "The City Beneath the City" which will hopefully tell me more about the link between metro construction and archaeology in Athens.
 
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#4 ·
Have they found anything of the Saxons or other Germanic tribes of the Völkerwanderung when they dug the tunnels for the Hamburg U-bahn?
Nothing that I know of. The only thing that points in that direction is an oakwood pole from some medieval foundation they found and which is now displayed in Jungfernstieg station. And since there's absolutely nothing interesting to see at a plain oakwood pole, they let an artist spoil it with carving some ugly 1960s-style figures out of it.
 
#6 ·
Kungsträdgården


Kungsträdgården station in Stockholm has statues and other objects from old buildings. Most of them are from the palace of makalös (built 1642) that was destroyed in a fire 1825. The station is though a museum rather than an archaeological excavation since the statues and the other objects have been moved from nearby parts of the city to the station.
 
#8 ·
They didn't finish Sofia's subway first leg of constructions for like 20 years because they found the ancient Roman city wall and many other things along the constructions site. But there is only one sculpture and some cpitals of columns. And they are supposed to costruct another station under the existing one for the second metro diameter aand it will have to go under the ancient romn forum and a palace of Constantine the Great. I think that's archaeolodical
 
#10 ·
Work has finally started on the construction of Thessaloniki's metro. Archeologists have designated the following stations as high risk archeological areas:

- Democracy square;
- Venizelou street; and
- Saint Sophia street stations


Archeologists have high expectations on what they are going to find there. It is speculated that the findings will range from the Hellenistic era through to the Ottoman era. As soon as there is any news/pictures I will let you know.

Great thread by the way!
 
#11 ·
well I live in the city and I saw the excavations on the first part for real. And I read about the new station in the newspaper and there was a map of the old city and everything and the chief architect of the city was conserned that they may damage the buildings of historic value that are underground. I'll search for more reliable information on the net.
 
#13 ·
ok, this is some interesting information (very old, though: Lenin square is now Independence square, the Party House is a part of the National Assembly etc. The plans for the underground are different too, you can find the new ones here : http://www.metropolitan.bg/index_eng.htm ) : http://www.international.icomos.org/monumentum/vol23-24/vol23-24_15.pdf

and here is some information from the Metropolitan Sofia website about Serdika station :

The metro station is located in close proximity to the rear gate of the ancient Roman fortress of Serdika (I century b.c. - V century a.d.) which was established at the site of a Thracian Bronze Era dwelling which existed till the III-II centuries b.c. Due to the favourable climatic conditions, the availability of mineral water springs and its strategic location, the Romans turned the city into anadministrative and military center of the Thracia Province. Emperor Marcus Uplius Trayan conveyed to Serdika the formal status of a Roman city. Archeological excavations in downtown Sofia have indicated that the ancient city was built up with massive stone buildings and had paved streets.

The city forum and the buildings of the Bulevterion, the Praetorium and the Gerusium - the seats of the Roman administrative power - were located not far away from the metro station. remnants of summer houses of prominent Roman administrators which used to visit and spend long period of time in Serdika, have been discovered immediately to the metro station.

The Western section of the Serdika station pier is located immediately below the fortress wall of Roman Serdika. most of the pier actually is located within the boundaries of the ancient city. The spatial design employs a scheme without columns with a high ceiling.

The architectural arrangement of the station resembles a symbiosis between a modern interpretation of the ancient heritage with a contemporary architectural design for the rest of the interior space. The pier fllor is made of polished granite in an ancient brown-rose colour. The two colours of the floor are used to replicate an imprint of an ancient roman construction discovered immediately after the tier.

I think this is reliable :)
 
#15 ·
Apparently alot of the routes on Rome's subway are hilariously (in a lighthearted, non-rude way) indirect, detouring around all sorts of old archaeological sites.

Funny this thread should be created, because I was just talking to someone about that the other day, and joking that "In Europe, even something as basic as building a subway is an archaeological dig!" ;)
 
#16 ·
In Brisbane our Inner Northern Busway construction teams recently came across an old WWII era underground bunker dating from when Macarthur had his HQ there that had been completely forgotten. That's about as far back as you are likely to hit in this country.
 
#17 ·
Naples will be an important example of archeological sites inglobed in the subway station. In one station there will be a roman temple of the imperial age (Duomo Station, Fuksas architect), in another station there will be roman ships found in the excavations for the construction of the station (Municipio Station, Alvaro Siza Architect). The pourpose is the creation of an archeological path/museum within the stations.

Duomo station: on the left you can see the roman temple.
 
#22 ·
Archaeologists dig into Rome's past so new subway line can go forward
By Gabriel Kahn
29 January 2007
The Wall Street Journal Europe

ROME -- AS THIS CITY begins work on a new, 25-kilometer subway line, massive earthmoving equipment sits idle while teams of archaeologists with tiny spades sift through dirt.

More than a half-million cubic meters of it is being removed by hand, to unearth the remains of tombs and stately residences that once made up the ancient metropolis beneath the surface of the modern city.

"Our guess is that these were probably taverns," said Anna Giulia Fabiani, shouting over the roar of weekday traffic as she surveyed ancient walls and doorways at a dig site across from the Colosseum.

Ms. Fabiani, an archaeologist, spent months excavating the site by hand. She and others are now in the process of documenting what they found. Eventually they will clear out so big mechanical diggers can break ground for what is to be the new metro line's largest station. Some archaeological finds will be preserved and others discarded.

But Rome's new subway never would have gotten this far if two bitter foes -- archaeologists and city planners -- hadn't agreed to compromise over an age-old problem. In Rome, modern progress is often slowed down by the past.

Italy's robust preservation laws make it difficult to renovate, remove or otherwise tinker with anything deemed to be of historical significance, and that includes most of central Rome. The laws have protected the capital from newer architectural eyesores but have left it ill-equipped to deal with the stresses of a modern metropolis.

Rome currently has only two modest metro lines to serve its 2.5 million people, leaving the city's streets regularly clogged with buses, cars and scooters whose pollution coats the historical monuments with grime. Neither line passes through the heart of the old city, an area always teeming with tourists.

But successive attempts by city planners to unclog the center by building underground parking garages and tunnels to handle traffic have run afoul of historical preservationists just about every time a shovel has hit the earth.

"It's like a parody," complains Enrico Testa, the chairman of Roma Metropolitane SpA, the city-owned company that operates Rome's subway. "There are treasures that are underground that would stay buried forever if we didn't have to dig. But as soon as we uncover them, our work gets blocked."

Rome isn't the only city to trip over the remains of its past. Athens, for example, also has strict preservation laws. Workers building the stadiums and venues of the 2004 Olympics frequently dug up pieces of antiquity in the process. An important find can need an all-clear from the culture ministry before work can proceed -- a requirement that delayed Greece's last-minute Olympic preparations. Workers building Mexico City's subway stumbled onto an Aztec temple. It was then integrated into a station design.

Breaking ground in Rome wasn't always so difficult. When the city started building its first metro in the 1930s, dictator Benito Mussolini refused to let history impede his master plan to create a modern Roman empire. Work didn't pause even when diggers clipped off a corner of the foundation of the Colosseum. The plans were crude: Engineers cut a canal alongside the ruins of the Roman Forum. Truckloads of dirt containing many ancient artifacts were carted off and dumped.

Since Italy emerged from World War II, however, preservationists and city planners have fought pitched battles over everything from subway lines to sewage pipes. When the city started work on one subway line in 1962, it tried to keep the state historical preservation office in the dark so as to avoid interference, recalls Giovanni Simonacci, who began working on that project in the 1970s and is chief engineer of the new metro line. It didn't work. "We'd find something and the [preservation office] would swoop in," he says. "We would then have to cover it over and change the route of the line. We lost years."

As workers were digging what is now the Piazza Repubblica metro stop near Rome's central Termini station, Mr. Simonacci says, they ran smack into the Diocletian Baths, a vast, third-century complex of gymnasiums, libraries, sculpture gardens and baths that could accommodate 3,000 bathers at once. "We moved some, destroyed some and changed our plans a bit to avoid destroying more." Trains didn't start running until 1980.

More than once, city officials have lost their cool with the preservation office. Former Rome Mayor Francesco Rutelli once nicknamed Adriano La Regina, former head of Rome's preservation office, "Signor No," because he blocked plans for tunnels and parking garages as the city tried to ready itself for the Catholic Church's Jubilee celebrations in 2000.

The standoff held until a few years ago, when planners and preservationists decided to bury the hatchet and work together on the new subway line. To reduce the line's environmental impact, the subway tunnel will be buried 25 meters below the surface, beneath even the earliest strata of archaeological remains.

The two sides got together to plot the best places to build stations and escalators leading down to them. The urban planners also acquiesced in letting archaeologists have first crack at the work sites to make sure nothing of great historical importance would be ruined by major excavation.

For the engineers, to work alongside the archaeologists isn't fast -- or inexpensive. The bill for constructing one kilometer of metro tracks in the center of Rome is more than 180 million euros ($232 million), and the project won't be completed until 2015.

For the archaeologists, minimizing the impact of the subway line by navigating around relics "is like a slalom course," says Angelo Bottini, who took over from Mr. La Regina as head of Rome's preservation office.

Yet Mr. Bottini recognizes that the new line also provides a tantalizing opportunity: "We never get to dig in the center of Rome."

At some sites, the remains of ancient roads lie just 10 centimeters beneath the surface. Not far from the Forum, for example, archaeologists dug up the remains of a large patrician home from the second century. It remains to be decided what they are going to do with it.

But there is so much lying below that "for a lot of this stuff, all we need to do is document it and then destroy it," says Mr. Bottini. Everything is photographed and its position recorded. Mr. Bottini's office makes the call about whether finds are preserved in place, taken away or destroyed.

One of Italy's problems is that it doesn't have enough museum space to hold all its artifacts. In fact, in designing the new subway line, the architects planned for the inevitable: a subterranean museum at one of the stations to hold significant pieces of antiquity expected to be dug up during construction.
 
#25 ·
another article about new Roman subway

Rome Subway Planners Try to Avoid Relics

By ARIEL DAVID
The Associated Press
Friday, February 2, 2007; 9:11 PM
washingtonpost.com

ROME -- In a city where traffic rumbles past the Colosseum and soccer fans celebrate victories among the remains of the Circus Maximus, it comes as no surprise that relics of the glory that was Rome turn up almost every day, and sometimes get in the way of the modern city's needs.

The perennial tug-of-war between preserving ancient treasures and developing much-needed infrastructure is moving underground, as the city mobilizes archaeologists to probe the bowels of the Eternal City in preparation for a new, 15-mile subway line.

Eyesore yellow panels have sprung up over the past months to cordon off 38 archaeological digs, often set up near famous monuments or on key thoroughfares of the already chronically gridlocked historical center.

Rome's 2.8 million inhabitants can rely on just two subway lines, the "Metro A" and "B," which only skirt the center and leave it clogged with traffic and tourists. Plans for a third line that would service the history-rich heart of Rome have been put off for decades amid funding shortages and fears the work would grind to a halt amid a trove of discoveries.

Those discoveries may now be just a shovelful away as archaeologists dig through more than 17 million cubic feet of earth, documenting finds that go from modern to Roman times. They will then sit down with planners of Rome's "Metro C" line to discuss the engineering nightmare of shifting stairwells and redesigning stations to preserve any relics of note.

"It's bit of a slalom to preserve the finds and still get the subway done," said Fedora Filippi, the archaeologist who oversees a dig in front of the baroque church of Sant'Andrea della Valle. "This is the daily life of urban archaeologists who must confront difficult and fascinating sites like this one."

In mid January, working amid the noisy traffic jam created by the dig, Filippi uncovered the massive cement foundations of a Roman public building dating back to imperial times.

Filippi said that further study is needed, but the 13-foot-thick wall could belong to a swimming pool or to a temple dedicated to the goddess Fortune, parts of a monumental complex built in the area by Agrippa, trusted general and son-in-law of Rome's first emperor, Augustus.

Other finds emerging across the city include Roman taverns found near the ancient Forum; cellars of 16th-century palaces located in the middle of Piazza Venezia and Roman tombs found outside the walls containing the remains of two children encased in amphorae.

Under Italy's strict conservation laws, it will be up to the state's archaeological office for Rome to decide whether a find will be removed, destroyed or encased within the subway's structures.

Angry rows between conservationists and urban planners frequently erupt when state archaeologists descend on building sites where finds have been made, snarling or canceling projects.

Countless public and private works have been scrapped over the years in Rome and across Italy, and it is not uncommon for developers to fail to report a find and plow through ancient treasures.

In 1999, the government defied preservationists by going through with a parking garage that sliced through a Roman villa during hurried preparations for the Holy Year celebrations. The decision caused outrage especially due to the previous discovery of mosaics and ceramics from the villa in a garbage dump on Rome's outskirts.

Archaeologists and planners have since learned to work together, said Francesco Rotundi, project manager for Metro C.

"There is an increased awareness on everyone's part," he told The Associated Press during a tour Thursday of the archaeological dig in the historical Piazza Venezia. "Solutions are found, even if they require more time and money."

Pointing to a hand-drawn sketch of the site, Rotundi said planners had already moved a circular underground corridor to avoid destroying the remains of a Renaissance palace located by the dig.

The archaeological probes are needed only to clear the way for stairwells and air ducts, as the line's stations and tunnels in the center will be dug at a depth of 80-100 feet _ below the level of any human habitation ever, Rotundi said.

The euro3-billion ($3.9-billion) project is due for completion in 2015, but parts of the 30-station line are scheduled to open in 2011, sporting high-tech automatic trains transporting 24,000 passengers an hour.

Locals and visitors say the new subway is painfully needed.

"There aren't sufficient lines to get to all the major attractions," said Steve Scanlan, a 48-year-old Londoner on vacation with his family. "You have to use taxis, buses, which are more troublesome."

But the delays may not be over yet. Archaeologists say no major finds have been unearthed so far, but most of the digs still have to reach the earth strata that date back to Roman times, where plenty of surprises may be lying in wait.


Archaeologists work by an ancient Roman wall at Rome's Piazza Venezia Square, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007. The perennial tug-of-war between preserving ancient treasures and developing much-needed infrastructure is moving underground, as the city mobilizes archaeologists to probe the bowels of the Eternal City in preparation for a new, 25-kilometer (15-mile), subway line, Metro C. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
 
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#28 ·
Unfortunatly there isn't any sort of station like this....but it would be pretty awesome have some in here...

Taking in account that Portuguese history is very rich in diferent tribes, clans, and civilizations occupating the country, and everytime they dig the soil for building foundations, tunnels (I believe that this also happened in Lisbon during metro excavation process) in major cities along from various river shores, they find all sort of stuff, from fossil's, to relics from celtic, goths, phoenicians, roman, or some buildings, graves or weaponry from the medieval ages....at least stuff to exhibit they would have
 
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