La gestion des eaux usées à Avenches /Aventicum ? Plus de questions que de réponses !.

If the means implemented for the supply of drinking water in Aventicum , capital of the Helvetians, are generally well known, the same cannot be said for the infrastructures allowing the evacuation of its wastewater and runoff, which have yet to be systematically and comparatively studied, both in the context of private dwellings and in the public domain. Recent restorations undertaken on the ancient wall in the lower part of the site have provided the opportunity to question once again the function of several conduits crossing it from one side to the other and designated under the term “aqueducts” when they were discovered in the 1920s. Observations made during diagnostic surveys carried out in 2015, 2016 and 2020 in plots of land located on both sides of the wall now tend to validate the hypothesis of a system for evacuating unwanted water beyond the urban enclosure, in areas that were unoccupied in Roman times and that were only cleaned up by drainage work during the 19th century.