The Ancient Quarries of Neri Antichi (black limestones) from Zeugitania (Tunisia)

Black limestones were often used by the Romans for stelae, statuary (especially in the Hadrianic period, Gnoli, 1988) and architectural elements (cornices and floor and wall facings, more rarely for columns), especially, given the appropriateness of their colour, in funerary monuments. They were referred to in general as "lapides nigra", starting from the first and most famous monument made with one of them, the "lapis niger" of the "Forum Romanum" that marked the tomb of Romolus; built in the VI c. B.C. and restored in Caesar's time, the tomb was covered with blocks of palombino nero (Fornaseri et al., 1995) from the Tolfa area, N of Rome. In modern times all black stones and marbles used in antiquity have been called neri antichi, which recently (Pensabene e Lazzarini, 1998) were subdivided into two groups: bigi antichi, true crystalline metamorphic marbles, and bigi morati, limestones of sedimentary origin. So far, the latter have only very seldom been studied mostly because of the unknown location of many of their quarries. A first list and archaeometric characterization was published by Fornaseri and others in 1995; since then only two more detailed studies have appeared: one on the neri antichi of Mani (Greece) (Bruno and Pallante, 2002) and one on the newly discovered quarry of Marmaro in the northern part of the Island of Chios (Greece) (Lazzarini, 2000). Three new quarry areas situated in Tunisia are presented here for the first time: in fact two of them (Djebel Aziz and Ain el Ksir) were known and mentioned by several scholars (Gnoli, 1988, Pensabene, 1994), but never properly described and documented; the third, at Djebel Oust, is fully unpublished.