Several quarries have recently been discovered within the territory of Vrsar Municipality using Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) or LiDAR visualisation and targeted field survey carried out within the framework of the ArchaeoCulTour project. The analysis of this data has allowed us to detect previously unknown, disused and overgrown quarries.
The tool used by quarry workers was a two-spiked hammer, which allowed to extract stone blocks of regular shape. These were detached from the bedrock by excavating grooves around the desired stone block, whereas wedges were subsequently used to detach the block from the underlying bedrock. The usual groove width in Roman quarries in Dalmatia was around 20 to 30 cm, which is almost the same as in the Roman quarries of Istria. A predominantly rectangular quarry layout resulted from this systematic exploitation. For this reason, field surveys of quarries in the Vrsar municipality and its wider area were aimed at documenting the general layout, the presence and dimensions of grooves, and the traces of tools (double-spiked hammers) left on the rock.
The quarries in the municipal area were mostly situated in the interior, far from the coast, on hilltops or hill slopes, whereas ancient quarries were typically located along the coast or in its vicinity, in order to simplify the loading of extracted stone blocks onto ships, as maritime transportation was the fastest and the most economical way of transporting stone blocks. Although the ancient quarries of the municipal area are rather far from the seashore, they were located near the probable route of the ancient Via Flavia road.
Among the recently discovered quarries the one located on Biškupovi Vrhi (Monte del Vescovo) is particularly interesting. The quarry layout is rectangular, which corresponds to the layouts of ancient quarries in Istria and Dalmatia and suggests stone extraction in this area during the Roman administration. There are clear traces of tools on the quarry face (striae) and grooves. The width of the grooves is 18 to 20 cm, corresponding to the dimensions of the grooves in ancient quarries in Dalmatia. Archaeological fieldwork carried out in the quarry in September and October 2020 as part of the ArchaeoCulTour project put into light several roughly worked stone finds. Following the size of the grooves discovered at the bottom of the quarry, the length, width and height of extracted stone blocks could be estimated to about 2 m length, 1 m width, and 80 cm thickness. We suppose that the blocks were used for making sarcophagi. Survey of the quarry has also been carried out by terrestrial laser scanning .
A second, smaller quarry (Biškupovi Vrhi 2) is located nearby. It is situated at the foot of the hill, on the north-eastern side. It was submerged by water during the first visit in January 2020, though it was still possible to discern its rectangular layout. We revisited the site in late September 2020 when the water had somewhat dried out and were able to record the traces of tools on quarry faces and the quarry layout. Five grooves were documented, all of them around 15 to 20 cm wide. No traces of modern tools were observed.
