Some two thousand years before Fernando Fernán Gómez, José Sacristán, Gabino Diego, Laura del Sol, María Luisa Ponte or Juan Diego formed a theatrical company to tour the towns of Spain in
The Journey to Nowhere
, other Roman actors decided to do the same. himself to earn a living.
Thus, by cart or on foot, as the characters in the Goya winning film in 1986 did, they arrived in the 1st century at Laminium (Alhambra, Ciudad Real), an old Oretan city conquered by Rome and converted into a
municipium.
(with their own institutions and rulers) by Emperor Vespasiano in the year 74. In 2017, the excavations co-directed by José Luis Fuentes Sánchez, from the University of Granada and the archaeological consultancy Oppida, began on the southern slope of a bare hill in the outskirts of the town.
With the grant of European funds that the cultural association Alhambra Tierra Roja obtained and the support of the Diputación de Ciudad Real and the regional government, they financed the excavation of a plot of about 1,500 square meters, and this turned out to correspond to the landfill of the Roman town .
And among more than two million fragments unearthed, they have found part of a theatrical mask painted in bluish black and wine red, and this has related the story of a traveling company.
The Oretan city frozen in time
The rubbish dump (
puticulum
), of about 5,000 square meters, “was a steeply sloping space into which mud and silt from the population that inhabited the city were dumped.
Food scraps, dead animals, household goods, construction scraps and all kinds of useless items for recycling also ended up in it, ”explains Fuentes.
That is to say, there used up oil amphoras, broken glasses and goblets from taverns or skylights that no longer served to illuminate houses and streets were thrown ... Even pavements and floors, among whose clays necklace beads had been hidden, coins and objects for personal use.
The fragments exhumed in the landfill were manufactured between the 2nd century BC.
C and I d.
C, "including a scenic mask of exceptional value made in terracotta, and of which the lower left area of the face is preserved", details the co-director of the excavations.
“In it, you can see part of the curl of the hair, the operculum to introduce the rope that would fix it to the actor's head, the lower area of the left eye, the left cheekbone, the left half of the nose and the upper left half of the mouth ”, reads the report that archaeologists have delivered to the Castilla-La Mancha Community Board.
The first investigations indicate that it is a female stage mask ―but possibly used by a man― “that shows a character in a serious attitude announcing tragic news”.
This type of facial covering was used in the representations of the so-called New Comedy.
Of this, historians know 44 comic characters and 25 tragic, of which 17 correspond to male characters and another eight female.
The recovered fragment maintains a bright red color on the lips and cheekbones, as well as bluish-black in the eye and cheek.
These traits constitute a distinctive sign of the attitude of the characters, as the red reflected female cunning, while the black referred to old age and experience in life.
“These masks used to be accompanied by wigs and beards with hair made from horse manes or strands of esparto dyed in bright colors.
Its internal shape made it possible to modulate the voice and transport the viewer to a strange, psychedelic environment, to a fantasy or mythical climate ”, points out the expert.
As the city of Laminium lacked - or at least has not yet been found - theater, specialists believe that it belonged to a “company of actors that moved from one nucleus to another and that acted in closed venues or in public environments, such as squares. ”.
For five years, archaeologists have focused on locating civil structures in the urban topography of the city (about eight hectares).
At the moment, the Fuentes and Tierra Roja team (40 university students and 7 workers) have already identified the maximum thistle and decumanus (the great avenues that crossed the municipality) in the area of the forum, remains of the walls and Roman and, in addition from the south extramural landfill.
And now, the mask that tells the story of a company of traveling actors that was not the Fernán Gómez in the film, but that looked like it.