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Origin and history

The Gallo-Roman villa of Séviac, located in Montreal-du-Gers, Gers, is a major archaeological site in southwestern France. Occupied for almost a millennium, this place was first a modest home in the first century, before becoming a sumptuous aristocratic villa in the second century, restructured at the end of the fourth century. The site is distinguished by its set of polychrome mosaics, made between the last third of the 4th and the first half of the 5th century, covering nearly 625 m2. These works, attributed to the School of Aquitaine, adorned reception and circulation spaces, and were restored between 2016 and 2018 under a translucent protective structure.

The site may have been discovered in 1864 when a farm was built, but the first serious excavations were carried out in 1868 by Abbé Monnier, who discovered a mosaic there. Research intensified before World War I, and then resumed in the 1950s thanks to Paulette Aragon-Launet, a member of the Gers Archaeological Society. This one, inspired by her father's accounts of Dr. Odilon Lannelongue (1911)'s excavations, rediscovered the site in 1959 and conducted annual campaigns from 1967 to 1997. In 2003, the property of the site was transferred to the commune of Montréal-du-Gers, after being managed by the Association for the Protection of Monuments and Sites of l'Armagnac.

The villa, organized around a 30-metre garden courtyard, included domestic spaces, thermal baths, and reception rooms decorated with remarkable mosaics, such as the tree mosaic (420-440). In the north, the pars rustica (agricultural part) remains unexplored, while in the east, a vestibule and a heated apse room, enlarged in the fifth century, testify to the splendor of the place. The south wing housed private baths (tepidarium, caldarium) and latrines. In the sixth century, a Christian Baptistery was added, and the ruins became a necropolis between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Classified as a historic monument in 1978 (extended in 2012 and 2014), the villa has been part of the archaeological pole Elusa Capitale Antique since 2008.

The objects discovered include a bronze toe (390 g, disappeared since 1910), Pyrenean marble capitals (420-440), and everyday artifacts (oil lamps, fibules, tools). A marble head (~400) and fragments of statuettes (Venus anadyomen, putto) are now exposed. The mosaics, restored by SOCRA (Periguous), are protected by a translucent roof of 2,070 m2. The site illustrates the evolution of a late aristocratic home, from paganism to Christianity, in a regional context marked by the Romanization and transformations of the High Middle Ages.

The excavations revealed a continuous occupation, from private baths to medieval burials, reflecting social and religious changes. The villa of Séviac, by its state of conservation and the quality of its decorations, offers an exceptional testimony of the life of the Gallo-Roman elites in Aquitaine, between Roman tradition and the emergence of the medieval world.

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