A basin more than two metres deep, lined in white marble and fed by a plumbing system built to be looked at, has come out of the ground at Saint-Martin-au-Val, on the edge of Chartres. Around it the 2026 dig recovered fragments of statues and sculpted reliefs showing mythological scenes, the finds that give the new season its headline. The sanctuary they belong to covers more than 10 hectares.
The work restarted this summer after a four-year pause and runs to early October, with the fountain pumped dry while diggers work and refilled during breaks, because the site sits on a former alluvial plain.
A sanctuary the size of a small town
Figures matter here, because the place is hard to picture. The City of Chartres archaeology service puts the complex at more than 10 hectares and calls it one of the largest religious complexes in Roman Gaul. It was built between the late first and early second centuries AD for the citizens of Autricum, the Roman town under modern Chartres, who gathered there for the major cult celebrations. A European Heritage Days programme for the 2026 open visits rounds the area up to nearly 11 hectares and describes it as the largest known ancient cult complex in northern Gaul.
HeritageDaily, which relayed the city’s announcement on 29 September, adds that the monumental temple and its walkways take up nearly 8 of those hectares, immediately south of the ancient town. The announcement is credited to the city’s archaeology department and quotes the mayor, Ladislas Vergne, and the deputy mayor for culture and heritage, Véronique Domagalski.
The marble basin and the water it moved
The water system is the part archaeologists keep returning to. Three basins are linked inside a building of roughly 600 square metres. The central one, square and more than two metres deep, is faced in white marble. On its eastern side a platform reached by steps is held back from the water by a balustrade, and the overflow and drainage channels show that the level was managed so that visitors would see the surface move and settle rather than simply drain away.
The city’s own description of the 2022 results reads this basin as a place for ritual washing before worshippers approached the altar of Apollo, and notes a second, decorative basin to the south, also in white marble. Radio Intensité’s report from the dig quotes the design as “rare, voire unique dans le monde romain”, rare or even unique in the Roman world, and says wall paintings and sculpture fragments tied to Apollo’s cult are being recovered from the same rooms.
The reported depth of the central basin, over two metres, is part of why the city reads it as a basin for ritual washing, and the steps, platform and balustrade on the eastern side show that access to the water was controlled. Wood is the other surprise. Beneath the marble, timber survives because fire hardened it before it dropped into the water-filled basins and floods then sealed it.
Bruno Bazin’s team and the wooden ceiling
The city’s page on the Gallo-Roman sanctuary names Bruno Bazin as scientific director, with a deputy director and wood specialist Emmanuel Bouilly alongside him, and records that the Ministry of Culture designated the dig a programmed research project in 2011, which secures annual funding. Their best-known result so far is a coffered wooden ceiling from the monumental fountain, found in 2017. The documentation states that the only comparable find in this field is from the Villa of Telephus at Herculaneum in 2010.
Intensité describes the dig as more than twenty years old, which explains the tone of the city’s materials: each season is read against a long record rather than as a one-off discovery. The previous Chartres campaigns produced decorated marble veneers from Italy, Greece and Turkey in the fountain’s northern third, blind arcades with marble facing on the interior walls, engaged Corinthian-style columns on the eastern wall and two staircases up to the portico and the altar. Set beside that, the sculptures of 2026 fill in the figured decoration that those architectural pieces framed.
That ceiling is why the 2026 season carries weight beyond Chartres. The Heritage Days text counts nearly 2,300 remains of a suspended wooden ceiling from the nymphaeum, a ceiling that fell into the water and stayed there for roughly 1,900 years. The sculptures and reliefs now emerging belong to the same building, which gives specialists a chance to tie a figured decoration to a known room rather than to a loose find.
The city has not yet published an inventory of the 2026 sculptures, and HeritageDaily’s account gives no count. Excavation was scheduled to continue until 2 October, after which the finds go to study, with its report of the announcement pointing to reconstructions of the altar of Apollo and the basin complex as the next publications.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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