Anaxum River Survey

The Stella River—ancient Anaxum of Pliny—is the most important artery of groundwater-fed river in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region and puts the middle and lower plains in contact with the Marano lagoon and northern Adriatic. Generated mainly from an underground stratum of water, the river is characterized by water flow that is roughly steady in every season, unlike the other great rivers of this region, which have torrential flows. This reliability has made the Stella a privileged waterway in every era, since it is one of the most northerly points of the entire Mediterranean Sea that is always navigable.

In the Roman era, the river was part of the Aquileia transmarine system. In fact, in ancient times, before flowing into the Northern Adriatic, it intersected both the consular Via Annia and the route within the lagoon that connected Aquileia to Ravenna. The latter consisted of an articulated system of waterways (rivers, canals and lagoons) that offered the advantage, when compared to the coeval marine route, of being available when the sea was closed by raging winds. Considering the potential of this river, “the Anaxum Project: Archaeology and History of a River Landscape” was born from a partnership between the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the University of Udine and the local Archaeological Superintendence.

The project involved three sites: Via Annia’s submerged structures, remains of the Roman shipwreck Stella 1, and the medieval Precenicco wreck. The site of the Via Annia Bridge, discovered in 1981, is located about 80 m downstream from the bridge of Highway 14 near the city of Palazzolo dello Stella and consists of five structures made of sesquipedali Norditalici brick, bound by mortar, with elements of stone blocks. Radiometric dating, carried out on five samples taken from the foundations of the structures, yielded a date for the structure of the second half of the 2nd c. B.C., which is consistent with the historical sources relating to the construction of the Via Annia.

The first excavations of the Stella 1 shipwreck site in 1998 and 1999 did not conduct a detailed study of the hull but rather focused mainly on the cargo, which consisted almost entirely of building materials, namely tegulae (flat tiles with raised edges). As part of the Anaxum Project, the hull was brought to light again in collaboration with Texas A&M. The wreck, dated to the end of the 1st c. A.D., lies at a depth between 4.6 and 5.6 m along the east bank of the river, and is a flat-bottomed barge with a maximum width of just over 2 m, a measurement that should be similar to that of the original boat, while the length has been preserved to only 5 m. From a construction point of view, the hull is part of the tradition of sewn boats, built according to the load-bearing shell construction system, where the assembly of the planking is joined by ligatures of vegetable fibers, here passed through circular holes and blocked by truncated conical pegs.

The shipwreck of Precenicco, exposed in 2012 during civil works a few meters from the west bank of the Stella River, is the remnant of a hull dated to the 11th–13th c. A.D. by C14 analysis. It is a flat-bottomed boat: despite not having a keel, the boat has curved sides and a smooth turn of the bilge, characteristics atypical in riverboats. Moreover, the internal structure—with alternating L-shaped floor timbers and only one futtock per frame—is a singularity, both for Italy and for the rest of Europe. The salvage excavation lasted just over a month at the end of the summer in 2014, and the timbers are currently in a vat awaiting restoration.