Luncavița
Luncavița
Location: Luncavița commune, Tulcea county (RAN 159749.01; TL-I-s-A-05837)
The Luncavița fortification is located on Milan hill, a rocky plateau with an elevation of 48 m. It is located 2.5 km north of the village, access is via a local road that forms at the entrance of road e 87 (DN22) in the north of Luncavița settlement.
The first mention appears in the manuscripts of Gr. Tocilescu, in the last years of the 19th century. Data concerning archaeological excavations on the territory of the fortification or other additional information are not known. There are no known mentions of any troops or clues as to the ancient name of the fortress. When we bring this fortification back into the discussion, we affirm that it is very likely that the fortification on Milan hill functioned during the 2nd – 3rd centuries AD. This site is only briefly mentioned in synthesis works on the Roman frontier, in voices from dictionaries, or brief mentions of archaeological research in the respective area, but regarding other historical eras or fortuitous discoveries.
Detailed research of orthophoto plans, maps, satellite data, and aerial photographs led to obtaining a much more complex plan. The contours of the enclosure walls and some buildings inside can be accurately observed in the negatives of the wall removal ditches.
The long side is oriented NS and has a length of 237 m, and the short one is between 87 m (north side) and 93 m (south side). One can observe the semicircular towers (or rather trapezoid?) on the east, south and west sides, and the corners. The tower in the southwest corner is the one best identified. Inside the fortification, numerous prints are visible, delimited by stone extraction ditches, which come from buildings that belonged to the last phase of habitation inside the fortification.
In the 2018 and 2019 campaigns, during the documentation and monitoring of the fortifications on the southern sector of the Roman border in Romania, we made several field surveys and two series of drone flights, which materialized in completing the cartographic documentation of Milan hill, as well as of the Rachelu fortification, also located on the territory of Luncavița commune. In order to better understand the details of the Roman defensive system and the proper delimitation of settlements and military installations in this area, the investigation was extended to as wide an area as possible.
The plan of the fortification on Milan hill was corrected as a result of obtaining some better resolution models, obtaining some additional details of the internal plan of the fortification, and making also corrections to the route of the enclosures through a better correlation with the plan drawn up by Polonic. By overlaying these data, we were able to clearly separate certain trenches, which in some portions contain elements of regularity and structures similar to trenches from the First World War. Similar trenches could be identified in other Roman sites in northern Dobrudja, such as Noviodunum or Salsovia.
Part of the study:
Ovidiu Țentea, Ioan C. Opriș, Florian Matei-Popescu, Alexandru Rațiu, Constantin Băjenaru, Vlad Călina, Frontiera romană din Dobrogea. O trecere în revistă și o actualizare, Cercetări Arheologice, Vol. 26, pag. 9-82, 2019, doi: https://doi.org/10.46535/ca.26.01
Bibliography
O. Țentea, Closing a gap. A roman fort rediscovered, în vol. Limes XXII. Proceedings of the XXIIth International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies, Ruse, Bulgaria, September 2012 (eds. L. Vagalinski, N. Sharankov) (= Bulletin of the National Archaeological Institute XLII, 2015), Sofia, 269-275; Țentea 2018, 105-118.