The Roman province of Dacia was created in 106 in what is now the Eastern part of Romania, and it remained a Roman province until 274, when it was abandoned in the face of Turkic and Slavic invaders. The province was defended until that time by a line of forts along the formal frontier of the province, and Tihau is one of these sites, built perhaps as early as 106, to guard the trade and invasion route along the Somes River linking Dacia with barbaricum. The fort was built in stone at some point by the legio XIII Gemina, while from the evidence of brick stamps, the garrison at some stage was the cohors I Cannanefatium, an auxiliary infantry regiment of 480 men originally raised in what is now the Netherlands, probably at the time of Vespasian. Resistivity and magnetometer surveys by the University of Nijmegen in 1999 have revealed the outline plan of many stone buildings in the fort, and these suggest that Tihau had a 'normal' layout for a fort built for a standard auxiliary cohort.

The Tihau Excavation Project is jointly directed by Julian Bennett of Bilkent and Coriolan Opreanu, of the Institute of Archaeology, Cluj-Napoca, and will begin in 2005. The objective is to excavate, over a five-year period, about one sixth of the fort's total area, to resolve three principal questions concerning the site and its immediate region. The first is establish what happened at Tihau after the Romans left Dacia in 274. While post-Roman artefacts have been found at several Roman fort sites in Dacia, these are usually dismissed as evidence of casual occupation, even though these finds include elaborate silver brooches and coins that post-date 274. It seems probable that some of these forts, and perhaps Tihau, were the centres of sub-tribal groups, taking advantage of what were well-defended sites. A second objective is to provide for the first time ever the complete chronology and details of a large area within one of the Roman forts in Dacia, previous work on sites of this type having mainly been restricted to a small-scale basis. The third objective is to establish what the nature of any pre-Roman occupation was at Tihau and in its immediate vicinity. Although there are many good reasons for believing that the Romans effectively wiped out the Dacian people, Dacian pottery has been found at a number of fort sites in the province, and is usually explained as indicating the continuity of the Dacian people into Roman times. There exists the strong possibility, however, that the Dacian pottery that has been found could well belong to an earlier settlement on or close to these sites and is, in fact, residual material.

For more information please contact Julian Bennett.