its podium closely related to that of the town walls. Forum The forum was the public square of the city and was the site of many important structures, included a basilica and a curia-comitium complex, as well as buildings Brown termed atria publica, which have now been shown to be houses. The forum of Cosa is fairly complex in archaeological terms and many of the Republican structures were later built over with constructions of the Imperial period. Important buildings in the forum area included: Temple B, a possible mall, a Comitium, a Curia, a Basilica, and included one of Italy's oldest monumental arches that allowed entrance into the forum. History The Forum of Cosa occupied one-tenth of the town-site. The first signs of activity in the Forum were of digging and opening of cisterns and pits. The four cisterns situated in the Forum held approximately 988,000 liters of water, which added to the Reservoir at the western corner of the Forum of 750,000 liters. The Reservoir was used as a public reserve and dated from before the arrival of the colony. The new cisterns were created as a response to the demand of the Forum, which was used as both a daily marketplace as well as a common gathering ground. A large enclosure, for the purpose of assembly, was constructed at a date before the First Punic War. It had an amphitheatric arrangement that had steps which were too little for seating and a floor too small for a gladiatorial arena. This was the Comitium of Cosa. There was a break in the creation of public works due to two decades of war and again another interruption in 225 BC by Gallic raids. The remains of a quadrilateral platform floored with tegulae, a form of tiling, were discovered southeast of the Comitium. It is suggested that this building had served as a rain catchment and the water collected here would have been impounded into a cistern. After the war had ended in 201 BC, new colonists arrived and set off a flood of activity. Eight very similar and unitary buildings were built around the Forum in the 170s, but were destroyed in the sack of Cosa a century later. These eight were known by Brown as the 'Atrium Buildings' although they have now been shown to have been houses. Once the square had been reconstructed, the Curia was rebuilt into