Arauzona

Where we stand

A hill that stands out for nothing in particular

Velika Mrdakovica is today — the catalogue is unexpectedly honest here — just one of the smaller hills that spread near the right bank of the Krka. It does not stand out from its neighbours in any particular way. It is a little higher. That is roughly all a casual passer-by would notice.

What the passer-by would not see: that the remains of Roman walls sit at the summit, and that at its foot, until recently hidden in scrub, lies an old cemetery excavated by the archaeologists of the Šibenik Museum. Or that the river running below the hill carried a different name in antiquity — Titius. Today we call it the Krka.

A town that stood here for two thousand years is mentioned by three ancient writers. Not one of them left so much as a sketch.

Ptolemy, the Anonymous of Ravenna and the Antonine Itinerary — all three speak of a town called something close to Arauzona, in the lower course of the Krka. No inscription bearing the town’s name has been found at the site itself, so strictly speaking one can only argue in terms of high probability. But the quantity and variety of local and imported material singled out Velika Mrdakovica as the most likely location — to the point where local and foreign scholarship now largely agree on it. A full overview of the ancient sources, with Ptolemy’s own coordinates, is on its own page.

The settlement

A town behind two walls

At the summit of the hill stood a hill fort settlement, enclosed by a double stone wall fortification. Two belts, two different techniques, probably two different generations of builders.

The earlier belt was made of unworked stone — a rampart of raw blocks forming a crest around the upper third of the hill. This was the first line of defence. The second, later belt was built of dressed ashlar, and so far has only been located on the western side, just below the crown of the hill fort. It followed the natural configuration of the terrain and was built where necessary — fortifying the town and defining its size at the same time.

Very little of it survives today. Large quantities of that stone served generations of farmers as ready-made building material — for houses, barns and dry stone walls throughout the surrounding area. Only a small part of the walls remains, along with the large stone blocks of the settlement entrance and remains of architecture that simply sank into the ground over time.

A view that explains everything

The site’s position was no accident. From the summit of the hill fort the view takes in the Vodice waters, the Krka estuary, the hill fort on Bribirska glavica and Šibenik’s St. Michael. The town, in other words, sat at a point from which you could see who was coming — by sea and by land.

Nearby, in Rakitničko polje, stood one of only two securely located Roman ceramic kilns for roof-tile production in the whole of Dalmatia. The western slopes of that same field today hide the abandoned village of Srdarići — one of the few fully intact indigenous rustic units, its houses built in the traditional technique of stone construction.

Continuity

Six centuries, one address

The archaeological material at Velika Mrdakovica spans from the 4th century BC to the 3rd century AD — continuously. That is six centuries of life on one and the same hill, through its prehistoric-Liburnian phase and through Roman Romanization, without a visible break.

And then, in the 3rd century, life at the hill fort stops. Why, the catalogue admits, is not known with certainty. If the population was still regularly burying its dead by Roman custom at the end of the 1st and beginning of the 2nd century, and that practice then ceases — one must conclude that a series of natural disasters, a major earthquake, or a conquest took place in the 3rd century, forcing the population to flee, and life at the hill fort simply ceased to exist.

Life fell silent here seventeen centuries ago. But it left enough behind to keep us awake.

Economy

A town that knew what was fashionable

Arauzona lay on the road connecting Jader (Zadar) with Salona (Solin) — the capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia. It also had a maritime connection through the port of Zaton. Two trade routes, one by land and one by sea, meeting at a town sitting exactly at their intersection — that usually means money.

The grave material confirms it. The necropolis has yielded terra sigillata from Arezzo and Aquileia — glazed red-surfaced Italian pottery, the era’s equivalent of imported designer tableware. One vessel comes from the southern Gallic workshop of La Graufesenque — a bowl decorated in relief, the work of a master whose name we do not know, but whose skill we can recognise. Glass bottles bear the stamps of Syrian-Palestinian workshops. Amber and pottery arrived from the Greek colonies on the eastern Adriatic.

Did trade run only one way? We cannot say for certain. The catalogue speculates that the "Mrdakovica people" may have offered something of their own in return — perhaps the widely known Liburnian wine — but at the current level of exploration that remains a pleasant assumption, not an established fact.

One thing is certain: by the Flavian period at the latest, local residents were using Roman coin as a means of payment. But, curiously, they almost never used it within the burial rite — more on that below.

The city of the dead

A hundred and thirty graves, two ways of burial

Systematic archaeological research led by the curator of the Šibenik Museum, Zdenko Brusić (1969–1974), uncovered part of the hill fort settlement and the necropolis on its southern side: around 130 graves, mostly Roman cremation burials (1st–2nd c.), but also prehistoric inhumation burials (4th–1st c. BC) still in use in antiquity, plus — as a curiosity — one medieval burial.

After a gap of nearly forty years, three new campaigns (2011–2013), led by senior curator Toni Brajković, added a further 15 new graves. They were jointly funded by the Town of Vodice and the Šibenik-Knin County.

What accompanied the dead into the grave was not random. According to the beliefs of the time, a person used the same things in the afterlife as in life — so the grave material is almost identical to that of the settlement on the hilltop: fibulae for fastening clothing, lucernae to light the way to the afterlife, and glass and thin-walled ceramics as products of the finest kitchenware of the day.

A coin for Charon

By Greco-Roman tradition, a single coin — gold, silver or copper — was placed beside the deceased to pay the ferryman Charon’s toll for crossing the mythical river Styx. At Velika Mrdakovica this custom appears only once — in the previously devastated grave NG 11, where an extremely rare and valuable bronze as of the emperor Vespasian was found.

Does that mean coin was scarce, or that this particular custom was rare here? The catalogue leaves the question open. The locals paid the Romans in coin — but their own dead, for some reason, mostly not.

The full funerary ritual — the pyre, the formula Ire licet, the last drink beside the grave — is described in detail on the Rhyton page, since it was precisely that vessel which set that story in motion in the catalogue.

What came out of the ground

A short catalogue of finds

Thirty-five years of excavation, two generations of archaeologists, and a list of objects that together sketch the portrait of a town that knew exactly what was fashionable in Rome.

The unexpected

Snails, mussels, and one expensive banquet

During the 2013 campaign, at the north-eastern edge of the necropolis, archaeologists came across something they had not expected: a great quantity of animal bones, mussel shells, murex and sea snails of the species Thericium vulgatum — the common spindle snail.

The bones point to a banquet organised according to Roman custom in honour of the deceased, shortly after burial, or to burnt offerings laid on the bier. The site is most likely an ustrinum — an enclosed cremation area — though the catalogue admits that, at the current level of exploration, this cannot be fully confirmed.

Then comes the more interesting part. The murex Hexaplex trunculus — which, incidentally, also turned up in the earlier 1969–1974 excavations of the necropolis — secretes the pigment from which imperial purple was made, a colour that, gram for gram, reached prices on the market higher than gold.

Smaller, poorer communities, it seems, sought and found a cheaper version of the same idea. Some things, apparently, never change.

Coincidence? Probably not — identical murex shells were also found inside a ceramic vessel during the 2008 archaeological campaign in Murter, pointing to a so-far unidentified, but consistent, material expression of belief in the afterlife along this entire coast.

Memory

How the village knew, before the science did

Long before any archaeologist ever set foot on Velika Mrdakovica, the residents of Vodice and Zaton already knew that something lay there. They just knew it differently.

In 1888 the schoolteacher Frane Škarpa recorded, in the Viestnik of the Croatian Archaeological Society, the stories local people had told him: that Velika Mrdakovica had been a great town, and that it was called Bela. That residents of Vodice, digging between the walls of a house, had found a gold ring. And that, as folk tales always go, treasure was buried somewhere still.

Until the first half of the 20th century, vineyards covered the land south of the hill fort. The soil was worked intensively, and something would regularly "see the light of day" — on plots that, according to Škarpa’s own reports, belonged to the Dukić, Čoga, Ivanda, Mrša and Cvitan families. Today, vines grow there again.

And there the story would have ended, had Mile Ševerdija of Zaton not spent years persistently carrying fragments of pottery from Velika Mrdakovica to Šibenik — until he convinced the archaeologists of the Šibenik Museum that it was "definitely worth starting to dig" here. Without that one persistent man from the next village, this page would probably not exist.

What comes next

A treasure chest that, by all accounts, is waking up

The plan — already in preparation at the time the catalogue was written — is to link the three parts of the Mrdakovica complex: the Pišča cistern, the settlement and the necropolis — by a footpath into a single unit, and to present the Liburnian-Roman town to the public once research and conservation are complete.

Soil samples from selected ceramic and glass vessels from the necropolis were sent to Pennsylvania State University for chemical analysis — the results should offer a more precise picture of the funerary customs performed here two thousand years ago.

Besides its archaeology, the site is also home to legally protected European green lizards, eagles and rabbits, alongside a wide variety of Mediterranean medicinal and ornamental plants. Velika Mrdakovica is, in other words, as much a botanical story as an archaeological one.

And down at the foot of the same hill — people are once again pouring, serving, raising a glass. Only now there is ice.

By the numbers

Arauzona in six figures

Sources

Toni Brajković, Velika Mrdakovica — Results of the Latest Archaeological Research (2011–2013)

Šibenik City Museum, 403rd temporary exhibition · Published by the Public Open University Vodice and the Town of Vodice · Vodice, 2014 · ISBN 978-953-58070-0-1 · English translation: Marija Mlinar

This page was prepared for guests of Arauzona on the basis of the catalogue cited above. For scholarly reference and image rights, please contact the Šibenik City Museum.