A Roman house with a coloured concrete floor and a marble basin emerged under a French street

Archaeologists in Fréjus, in the Var department of southeastern France, have uncovered an entire Roman house on Rue Aubenas, complete with a coloured concrete floor and a marble basin. The dig lies under a street in the historic centre, opposite the Aulézy nursery school, in what was the Roman city of Forum Julii.

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The excavators are the city’s own archaeology service, directed by Pierre Excoffon, and the finds were reported on Oct. 24 and 25, 2026. Beside the house, the team has exposed a monumental structure that may be a temple or sanctuary, although the people on site describe that identification as provisional.

Rue Aubenas: a domus around an atrium on the cardo maximus

According to the regional news site Var Actu, which drew on the City of Fréjus’s communications, the whole house has been uncovered. It is a Roman domus, a town house, organised around an atrium, the inner courtyard with rooms distributed around it, and it opened directly onto the cardo maximus, the main north-south street of the Roman city. The coloured concrete floor and the marble basin are the two features the reports single out.

The record is thin on room-by-room detail. The reports name the atrium and describe adjoining rooms without counting or labelling them, give no dimensions for the floor or the basin, and offer no more specific date than Roman antiquity, with Var Actu calling the neighbourhood nearly 2,000 years old. A reader looking for a floor plan, a pattern on the concrete or the type of marble will not find it in what has been published so far.

The marble basin raises an obvious question that the reports leave open. In a Roman atrium house, a basin set in the courtyard floor is often the water-collecting feature of the room, but neither Var Actu nor HeritageDaily says where in the house this one stood, what it held or whether it was fixed in its original position. Likewise the coloured concrete floor is described only by that phrase. Together the two features indicate a house of some comfort, since marble had to be brought in and a finished floor had to be laid, but the reports do not put a name to the owner or a date on the work.

That restraint is typical of an excavation still in progress. The city archaeologists have not yet released a plan or a dated phase for the building, and the structures may be revised as the layers around them are studied. What is fixed is the setting: the house sits close to the crossing of the cardo maximus and the decumanus maximus, the city’s two principal axes, which put the plot at the heart of the town.

A possible temple at the crossroads of the Roman grid

The second find is a monumental complex near that intersection. Archaeologists suggest it may be a temple or sanctuary, but HeritageDaily reports that the identification remains provisional pending further investigation, and its function, architecture and relationship to the surrounding quarter all still need study. A public building at the main crossroads would fit the layout of a Roman town, but a fit is not a confirmation, and the city has not claimed one.

Excoffon presented the discoveries during a site visit, and the HeritageDaily report quotes him saying the excavations are giving new information about the layout and occupation of this important Roman urban centre. Var Actu, by contrast, carries no direct quote from him. HeritageDaily says the work is led by municipal archaeologists it does not name, so Excoffon, as director of the service, is the only archaeologist identified in either report.

The wording here deserves a caution. The finds have so far been communicated by the city, through local media and a secondary archaeology site, not through a published excavation report. The institute that carries out most French rescue digs, Inrap, is not named in either account, and both describe a municipal programme. Fréjus employs its own archaeologists, which is why the announcement came from the city administration, and that arrangement explains why the information so far arrives as a communications release and a site visit for journalists, not as a scientific publication with plans and dated phases.

Spring 2026 programme and what may lie in the neighbouring quarter

The current research programme in Fréjus’s city centre began in the spring of 2026. In June, a different Fréjus site was opened to the public as part of the European Archaeology Days, which shows the city has more than one dig in the historic centre and has opened at least one to visitors. No public event has been announced for Rue Aubenas, and Var Actu says more discoveries are possible in the coming weeks.

The team’s observations suggest the neighbouring quarter may have held two or three more houses, an expectation the city says still needs further excavation. That would turn a single domus, into a small residential block set beside a possible temple, which is the picture the archaeologists now intend to test. For background on the town, see the entry on Fréjus.

The vocabulary of the dig comes from the Roman street plan. Reference entries explain the cardo, the domus and the atrium. In Roman towns the north-south and east-west streets set the grid within which every house and public building was laid out, so a house opening onto the cardo maximus sat on the busiest axis of the town.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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