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The villa at Matrice lies a few kilometres to the north east of Campobasso and south of the municipium of Fagifulae, to whose territory it presumably belonged (Lloyd, 1991a: 261). The site dominated a fertile valley just below the southern Biferno watershed, an area the subject of intensive fieldwalking by the Biferno valley survey between 1974–78 (Barker, 1995). The site was first discovered in the late 1970s during the construction of a road to the north of the church of Santa Maria della Strada. Excavations, directed by John Lloyd, were undertaken by a joint team from the Universities of Aberdeen and Sheffield between 1980 and 1984 (Lloyd and Rathbone, 1984).
The site was first inhabited during the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age, but it was in the later Samnite period (c. 200 BC) that a much larger structure built of roughly trimmed limestone blocks was constructed which has been interpreted as a substantial farmstead (Lloyd, 1991b: 184). The advent of Roman control in the area seems to have affected the villa considerably. The density of habitation in the area decreased considerably and Matrice emerged as the main or only site at the head of the valley.
In the early first century AD a substantial restructuring and enlargement of the villa took place, with many new rooms built in opus reticulatum. This larger villa contained a suite of pressrooms and sunken dolia, devoted most likely to the production of wine. However, the paucity of amphorae from the site suggests that this was not a large-scale operation, which agrees with the modesty of the press installations (Lloyd, 1991a: 262). Imported amphorae, obviously reflecting consumption rather than production, had been mainly from Puglia during the Republic, but in the Empire came from Campania and later from North Africa.
The villa continued to flourish into the late second century AD: the excavations discovered a refuse deposit containing pottery and glass from Etruria, Campania and North Africa – over a third of the vessels in the deposit were non-local fine tablewares. Even in the later empire, the 4th and early 5th centuries AD, quantities of...