Situation and Access
The site at Sa Mesquida is situated in the bay of Santa Ponça next to the hypermarket Caprabo. This station could be considered as the first example of a roman villa excavated in Majorca.
Its discovery came about at the end of the last century when Seguí Rodriguez noted in 1886 the appearance of some ceramics in the surroundings of a place called Sa Mesquida. In 1976, during the building work of a house, they collected various materials, but it was not until 1984 with the construction of a supermarket, when they found the first structures and they began the systematic excavation of the site..
Description of the structures
The results obtained from the excavation have discovered the structure of a part of this roman villa and to get to know the activities that they did. The architectural structures uncovered, show the existence of a series of rooms of a similar size situated around a central patio containing a well.
One of the most important discoveries are the remains of an oven for the production of ceramics and two tips where the three the imperfect pieces and/or the overdone. On the other hand the presence of the remains of deposits for the transformation of produce from the fields and other indicators like a weight network, seem to show that the settlement dedicated to the production of agricultural and local maritime resources as well as the production of common ceramics..
The cronology of these structures is centred around the I century A.D. although the latest campaigns have documented the existence of different phases before our time.
The most spectacular discovery was the tank that you can see at the entrance of a block of apartments in the Via Puig Blanc. While building on the land, an excavating machine pulled part of the roof of this tank off. The archeological excavation showed that this structure had been used as a dung heap in the V century A.C. and also at the end of the VI century A.C.
In its interior they found traces of the daily life of the villa at that time. They recovered a great deal of ceramics, cooking utensils, amphoras, glassware, building materials and a lot of wild which has allowed us to obtain a lot of information on the eating habits and activities like hunting. Amongst the ceramics uncovered, you can find pieces that had arrived from all over the Mediterranean: the near East, North Africa, the South of France, of mainland Spain and of Ibiza, which provides very important information on maritime commerce during ancient times and that it discounts the idea that at this period the Balearic Islands were isolated owing to the fall and crisis of the Roman world.