Few universities can boast of having an archaeological site under their facilities. On the Raval campus of the University of Barcelona (UB), students excavate what was the potter Antoni Tarrés’ workshop every summer and each campaign surpasses the previous one. In the last one, hundreds of pieces destined to decorate gardens and also sculptural pieces destined for homes have emerged. Female characters, a triton or a series of large heraldic shields of European royal houses have been recovered.
“In some renovation works at the workshop, they raised the level of the pavement using discarded or broken pieces… and that is the layer in which we are now working and documenting,” explains Jacinto Sánchez, director of the excavation.
The site is located in the interior patio of the Faculty of Geography and History, between Montealegre, Ramelleres and Tallers streets. At number 45 of the latter the house and workshop of the Tarrés family are preserved, in whose backyard (the site) there were the mills, the water well, swimming pools and structures to obtain the clay to make the pieces.
Pottery was a very important industry in the expanding Barcelona of the 19th century and the Tarrés family workshop is the only one that remains and has been excavated for nine years. “The material found this year can expand the known repertoire of Tarrés and demonstrate his participation in more buildings than those currently attributed to him (which are more than fifty),” explained Salvador Garcia, professor emeritus of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the UB and expert in the figure of Antoni Tarrés.
One of the discoveries of this last campaign that have drawn the most attention to specialists are the five large heraldic shields of the unified royal houses of Sweden and Norway, of the Bonaparte family, of the Ottoman Empire, of the house of Savoy (Italy) and of the Russian tsars. “They possibly correspond to the decades of 1860 and 1870 and were manufactured for some event organized by the Spanish monarchy,” deduces Garcia. In the case of the Bonaparte shield, a fragment appeared in the 2014 archaeological campaign and another one has appeared this summer.
Unique pieces such as a manger house or several small busts of characters with Asian features have also been recovered, “which respond to the taste of the time for exoticism,” reasons Garcia, who explains that, despite being pieces of series, “they have a sculptural part and a finish that makes them unique. Other findings that the third and fourth year Archeology students are documenting are of an ornamental nature and made with sculptors such as Josep Anicet Santigosa.
“It is a spectacular material from an aesthetic and also historical point of view, we have enough pieces to consider an exhibition; the topic deserves it,” says Ricardo Piqueras, dean of the faculty. Next year the site will be ten years old, “there is a lot of work ahead,” says Sánchez. For now, the thousands of pieces that the students have documented are in the warehouse located in the Free Trade Zone.
