In the 10th and 11th century B.C. the villages on the Palatine and on the Capitoline used the uninhabitable and marshy plain of the Roman Forum as sepulchral area. In the 8th century B.C., after the unification of the villages and the enlargement of the inhabited area, the burial grounds of the Forum kept on being used only for children’s burials, while the necropolis was moved to the Esquiline. According to tradition, King Tarquinius Priscus (616 – 578 B.C.) drained the plain between the Capitoline, the Palatine and the Velia with a series of drainages. The most important of these drainages was the Cloaca Maxima which canalized the watercourse of the Velabrum in the Tiber. The figures of tradition seem to match those of archaeology dating the first paving of the Roman Forum, simple dirt floor, to about the year 600 B.C. In the 6th century B.C. the Forum was already the centre of the political, religious, and civil life of the city. It was composed of a central area for the market closed, on the West by the Comitum, where the curiae would meet, and on the East by the regia and by the house of vestals. In 509 B.C., after the removal of the last Etruscan king and the foundation of the republic, the tribune of orators, structures strictly related to the new political system, the Temple of Saturn and the Temple of Dioscuri were constructed in the Roman Forum. The Porcia, Aemilia, Sempronia and Opimia basilicas were constructed in the 2nd century B.C. From the 1st century B.C. to the 1st century A.C. the Roman Forum was affected by an intense building activity that gave the area, at the end, a more architecturally functional and organic look. The west side of the square was closed by the Tabularium, the north side by the Curia Iulia and by the Basilica Iulia which replaced the Sempronia. The east side was closed by the Temple of Divine Iulius and by the arches dedicated to Gaius, Lucius Caesar and Augustus. On the south side, the Basilica Aemilia was restored. Moreover, a new paving in travertine was completed. From the 2nd to the 4th century A.C. many civil and religious buildings were added without any radical change to the Augustan setting.