From June 4th till 21st June 2015 the first archaeological campaign incorporated to the CROMART project was conducted on the island of Rab, involving team members A. Chavarria, G. P. Brogiolo, M. Jurković, R. Starac, as well as a group of students from Zagreb and Padova Universities and G. Bilogrivić, archaeologist.
Following former projects: The transformation of the historical landscape of the island of Rab (University of Zagreb grant, 2014) and the LLP Erasmus Intensive programme: IntSYSTEM, Integrated systems of sources, technologies and methods – remote sensing of historical landscape (funded by the EU commission, 2014), and after the workshop held in Padova in April 2015, it has been decided that the island of Rab should become a good case study in verifying new methodologies and implementing new technologies in research within the CROMART project.
Therefore, two primary sites have been chosen – the newly discovered church of St Lawrence in Banjol (funded partly by the Croatian Ministery of Culture), and structures found in the inner courtyard of the restaurant “Kuća rapske torte” (funded partly by the University of Padova).
The results of the first campaign justified the choice of the sites for the purposes of the CROMART project: the church of St Lawrence produced some fragments of liturgical furnishings imported from the Constantinopolitan workshops of the 6th c., raising the questions of transfer of works of art in the Mediterranean during late Antiquity. On the other hand, the courtyard in the town of Rab revealed a portion of the city walls built with extreme use of spoliae, reused sarcophagi, showing that that part of the walls was built in urgency, probably in the period of wars between Goths and Byzantium in the 6th c. This finding completely changes the knowledge about the urban development of Rab.