ROME TRANSFORMED: STUDYING THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE EASTERN CAELIAN

With the bulk of its fieldwork completed in the first four years of our five-year project, ROME TRANS 'Rome Transformed: interdisciplinary analysis of political, military and religious regenerations of the city's forgotten quarter C1-C8 CE' [https://cordis.europa. eu/project/id/835271], this year saw more targeted work in site activity aimed at answering specific questions that emerged from our research.As a result, the work which we did undertake was varied, challenging and in some ways still more fruitful, because it capitalized on our growing experience of the structures, spaces and landscape of the study area.From the outset the project has depended on the best possible geospatial data to ensure that the structural analysis, environmental survey, geophysical prospection and archival research can be brought together to map transformation convincingly.Maintaining a high-resolution geospatial control is a decidedly non-trivial task, and with so many work packages being delivered by so many teams at multiple sites across our 68-hectare research area gaps in coverage were to be expected.At the end of February 2024 Stephen Kay and Elena Pomar (British School at Rome) undertook a vital period of topographical survey work to close those gaps; this complemented an earlier programme of work using laser scanning in Piazza S. Giovanni in January which was used to further tighten the control.The surveying complemented ongoing study of the project's geophysics data, including notably the work of Salvatore Piro in the Lateran/ Patriarchium area, together with other data gathered by the BSR team within the Rome Transformed project.In addition to the survey work, there was an extended period of structural analysis and laser scanning in January and February 2024 coordinated by Thea Ravasi.Much of our work focused on the western end of the research area, in and around the Archbasilica of S. Giovanni in Laterano (the Lateran Basilica).Here Alex Turner completed a new photographic survey of the enigmatic 'Trapezoidal Building' that lies beneath the Archbasilica's late-nineteenth-century apse, while Susan Rands and David Williams reappraised brick and stonework elements of the Castra Nova.Elettra Santucci lent her expertise on hydrological engineering to the challenge of interpreting the chambers within the Castra ramparts, confirming definitively that at least some of them were used as water reservoirs.