Conquest by the Roman Empire

When Rome reached our mountains, the Ucenni were still well established in the valley. We know that by 6 BCE the Ucenni had been conquered, because their name appears on the Trophy of the Alps, an ancient monument listing all the subdued Gallic tribes. Thanks to their isolated territory, they were probably among the last Alpine peoples to be integrated into the Empire, just before the Trophy was erected. By comparison, the Allobroges of the Grenoble region had already been subdued for more than a century. Despite this late conquest, the local population changed little: for about 2,500 years, the valley remained the product of a mixture of Ligurian and Celtic cultures. Even the names of the villages bear this heritage. The word “Grave” comes from the Celtic grava, meaning “sand”, in reference to the deposits of the Romanche. The Romans naturally translated this name as arena, their own word for “sand”. Throughout the Middle Ages, maps used “arena inferiores” to designate La Grave, while “arena superiores” would give its name to Villar-d'Arène. The people of La Grave, however, faithfully kept their original Gallic name, passed down without interruption for more than a millennium, right under the nose of the Roman invader. Antiquity left few material remains in such a narrow valley, but a few clues show that passage through it was not nonexistent: a 1st-century BCE coin found around the church of La Grave, and an intaglio depicting Apollo, dated to the 3rd century. Dauphiné, and therefore La Grave, remained part of the Roman Empire for nearly 440 years.