Arqueologia urbana en el area central de la Ciudad de Cordoba, Argentina : Excavaciones en la Sede Corporativa del Banco de la Provincia de Cordoba (2014-2016)

Urban archeology in the central area of ??the City of Cordoba, Argentina. Excavations at the corporate headquarters of the Bank of the Province of Córdoba (2014-2016).

This work is part of a line of action proposed by the Institute of Anthropology of Córdoba (IDACOR), doubly dependent executing unit of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and the National University of Cordoba (UNC). This action requires the intervention of professional archaeologists in order to evaluate the impact produced by subsurface excavation in cases related to the development of real estate projects.

Within this framework, in February 2014, there was the need to implement an archeological impact study on land under cadastral nomenclature 04-04-020-023 in the city of Cordoba, Argentina. The study was conducted in two instances. The first took place between the months of April and June 2014, consisting of various actions related to the systematic archaeological excavation, registration, conservation and interpretation of material culture recovered in depths between the surface and about 2.5 / 3m deep. The second stage, implemented between February and August 2015, consisted of the monitoring of the excavation while using heavy machinery allowed archaeologists to reach greater depths. The results of these tasks were submitted to the local authorities in five partial reports presented collectively here in order to have all the information available in one volume.

As a result of the excavations it was possible to retrieve information about land use in the last two hundred years. Previous occupations have been masked or destroyed mostly by architectural interventions in the mid-nineteenth century and early twentieth century. However more than 30,000 objects recovered during the archaeological project help us to interpret the life of the people who inhabited these spaces, as well as local and international production and trade networks where they were integrated.

Along with this, it was possible to recover significant portions of architectural structures that probably correspond to the eighteenth century, being the oldest constructive feature found on the parcel. This action, perhaps the most difficult due to the sheer scale of the objects, allowed the implementation of a novel technique for the recovery of archaeological objects in the city of Córdoba.