Santa Cristina (Buonconvento ??? SI): le campagne di scavo dal 2009 al 2012

The first of four projected campaigns at the site of Santa Cristina in Caio allowed us to investigate the use of a bath complex built between the last third of the first century BC and the first half of the first century AD, as well as the reuse of the complex for production immediately after its abandonment, and successive phases of occupation. The baths were inserted inside a vast rural complex that can be interpreted as a village with the additional function of a mansio along the via Cassia, probably part of the cursus publicus indicated in the Tabula Peutingeriana as a detour of the Cassia between Chiusi and Siena. After the abandonment of the baths in the middle of the fourth century it was transformed for artisanal activities, lead working and probably glass production. Between the end of the sixth and the eighth century ??? the last phase of the complex ??? the complex remained a village, with huts of different typologies. On the summit of Poggio alle Fonti, a hill adjacent to the excavation, we know that there was in the first quarter of the ninth century an oratory called Sancta Christina, which we later find documented as a parish. Abandoned after the middle of the sixteenth century and demolished at the end of the eighteenth, nothing remains of the church.