"VII EXCAVATION CAMPAIGN IN THE MEDIEVAL TOWN OF IFACH (CALP)".

"VII EXCAVATION CAMPAIGN IN THE MEDIEVAL TOWN OF IFACH (CALP)".

 

The MARQ in collaboration with the Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Calp and the Parque Natural del Penyal d'Ifac, dependent on the Consellería de Medi Ambient, Aigüa, Territori i Habitatge de la Generalitat Valenciana, will start, from the 1st of July until the 31st of August 2011, the seventh campaign of archaeological excavations in the medieval town of Ifach, under the direction of the MARQ archaeologist, José Luis Menéndez, and the support in the field of the archaeologists Roberto Ferrer Carrión and Joaquín Pina Mira.

  

For the realization of this seventh campaign, as in previous years, the Diputación de Alicante has signed a collaboration agreement with the City Council of Calp in order to share efforts that benefit the future development of this archaeological site, declared of Cultural Interest in 2010 by the Ministry of Culture. In this way, and thanks to this new agreement, which reinforces the close collaboration maintained between both institutions in recent years, in this 2011 campaign a number of more than 50 archaeology students from 13 Spanish and European universities will participate in this seventh edition of the excavation works of the medieval Pobla de Ifach; among them, the universities of Alicante, Salamanca, Malaga, Seville, Complutense and Autonomous of Madrid, Cantabria, Santiago de Compostela, Castilla La Mancha, Barcelona and Valencia stand out.

 

The objectives of this campaign will focus, firstly, on the discovery of the access system to the settlement, located in the western sector of the site and partially discovered in the 2010 campaign, which will surely provide vital information for the study of the internal organisation of this urban enclave built from 1298 onwards. The second objective will be to detect the habitat structures in the eastern sector of the site, in the hope of finding urban spaces connected to the area of the church of Our Lady of the Angels, the nerve centre of the medieval town of Ifach. In addition, others are being considered, such as the extension of the excavations in the South Chapel of the Church of Our Lady of the Angels, (built between 1320-1340 by Doña Margarita, Countess of Terranova and daughter of Admiral Roger de Llúria, founder of the town of Ifach at the end of the 13th century), one of the emblematic buildings of the site discovered in the 2008 campaign, with a width of more than 10 metres and a length of around 30 metres. Precisely, in the 2009 campaign, the complete vault of one of the auxiliary chapels of this important building was discovered. This year, starting from a doorway that showed the chapel, the aim is to enlarge this area to document whether this space is larger than we have known so far. In this way, the MARQ research team will continue to delimit the two buildings discovered in the 2009 and 2010 campaigns and whose functions are still unknown. In addition to these objectives, work will continue on documenting the necropolis located in front of the entrance façade to the church of Ifach.

At the same time, and taking advantage of the high tourist occupation of Calp during the summer months, a weekly programme of visits to the archaeological site, guided by the scientific team of the MARQ, has been prepared, together with the Tourism Department of the Calp Town Council, in order to present to the public the news and advances that the archaeological excavation is generating during the research.

At the same time, and organised by the technical team of the Penyal d'Ifach Natural Park, educational activities will be offered for children, with the aim of learning about the archaeological work and discovering the history of this important medieval enclave in Alicante.