O prezentare succintă a evoluției locuirilor în situl de la Rapoltu Mare – La Vie (jud. Hunedoara, România)

The systematic excavation of Rapoltu Mare – La Vie site (RAN code 90672.02) began in the summer of 2013, in the form of an archaeological diagnosis, whose results opened the perspective of extensive and long-term investigations of the discovered remains. From that moment until now (2023) a decade has passed, which is why, in the present lines, we are trying to present the results of the undertaken research, this time as an extensive report. The archaeological objective is located in the south-western corner of Transylvania, in the central-eastern part of Hunedoara County (Fig. 1). La Vie point is situated at the northwestern edge of Rapoltu Mare village (Fig. 2; Pl. I/1-2), on the second terrace from the right meadow of Mureș (north), about 1.5 km upstream from the confluence area of Strei and Mureș rivers and at the same distance from the volcanic neck of Măgura Uroiului. Archaeological discoveries from this point are reported as early as the last decades of the nineteenth century. Much later a field survey of the area was undertaken, in order to verify the information from the older bibliography, a first trial pit being conducted in 1999. Other archaeological excavation, also in the form of a test pits, were those from the summer of 2013. The obtained results created the premises for transforming the intrusive diagnosis into a systematic archaeological excavation, which allowed the identification and digging of archaeological contexts that, from a chronological point of view, are stagged from the Paleolithic to the Modern Age. Of these, the most intensive habitation proved to be in Roman times, during the II-III centuries AD. The stratigraphy of the site revealed the succession of pre-Roman dwellings and the phases of arrangement of the identified Roman complex (Fig. 3-4). Below the vegetable, plough level, in which archaeological materials, especially Roman, were already found, were noted between six and eleven layers, depending on the situation in the investigated areas, which allowed the classification of anthropogenic traces in many epochs. It has been observed that the oldest human habitation in this place dates back to the Upper Paleolithic, followed by a consistent one from the Early Neolithic, then by the dwellings from the Eneolithic, the Early Bronze Age, the Second Iron Age and the Roman Age, for which two stages of construction of a villa rustica complex were observed. In the investigated areas it could be observed that, in prehistory, the Pa