Archeology Roundup

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, "Long time archaeological riddle solved," Jerusalem Post, July 2, 2010

The riddle of the identity of a 3,200-year-old round bronze tablet with a carved face of a woman has apparently been solved, 13 years after it was discovered at the El-ahwat excavation site between Katzir-Harish and Nahal Iron (Wadi Ara) by scientist Oren Cohen of the University of Haifa.

The small, broken-off piece of metal is probably part of a linchpin that held the wheel to a war chariot sent to battle by the Canaanite general Sisera against the Israelites, says Prof. Adam Zertal, who for 33 years has led weekly walks with university colleagues and volunteers over “every square meter” of Samaria and the Jordan Rift to search for archeological evidence from biblical times.>>>

"2000-year-old human skeleton found at Gloucestershire Roman villa dig," This Is Gloucestershire, July 5, 2010

A 2,000-YEAR-OLD human skeleton has been unearthed alongside Iron Age artefacts near Tewkesbury.

Archaeologists uncovered signs of the ancient Roman villa in a field on the edge of Bredon's Norton. It is thought the finds could be of national importance.

Metal detector hunts in recent years had led historians to suspect an ancient community might be found there.

That was confirmed when contractors who were laying a new water pipeline began digging.>>>

"Female 'gladiator' remains found in Herefordshire," BBC, July 1, 2010

Amongst the evidence of a Roman suburb in Credenhill, they have found the grave of a massive, muscular woman.

The archaeological Project Manager, Robin Jackson, said: "Maybe the warrior idea is one that you could pursue, I'll leave that to people's imaginations."

Her remains were found in a crouched position, in what could be a suburb of the nearby Roman town of Kenchester.>>>

Nicole Winfield, "Lasers uncover first icons of Sts. Peter and Paul" AP, June 22, 2010

ROME — Twenty-first century laser technology has opened a window into the early days of the Catholic Church, guiding researchers through the dank, musty catacombs beneath Rome to a startling find: the first known icons of the apostles Peter and Paul.

Vatican officials unveiled the paintings Tuesday, discovered along with the earliest known images of the apostles John and Andrew in an underground burial chamber beneath an office building on a busy street in a working-class Rome neighborhood.>>>

Dinesh Ramde, "Chilly waters preserve 1890s shipwreck well," San Francisco Chronicle, June 25, 2010

A great wooden steamship that sank more than a century ago in a violent Lake Michigan storm has been found off the Milwaukee-area shoreline, and divers say the intact vessel appears to have been perfectly preserved by the cold fresh waters.

Finding the 300-foot-long L.R. Doty was important because it was the largest wooden ship that remained unaccounted for, said Brendon Baillod, president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association.>>>

Mary Beard on Pompeii in Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

The latest issue of Historically Speaking includes my interview with Mary Beard. I post an excerpt of it here. The full piece can be accessed on Project Muse.

Rome Unearthed: An Interview with Mary Beard on Pompeii and the Ancient World

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. She was Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature for 2008–2009 at the University of California, Berkeley. Beard is the author of a variety of essays and books on the ancient world, including: Religions of Rome, with John North and Simon Price (Cambridge University Press, 1998); The Parthenon (Harvard University Press, 2002); and The Roman Triumph (Harvard University Press, 2007). Beard is also the classics editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and she is the author of the popular blog, “A Don’s Life.”

Beard’s scholarship has long challenged certain widely held views of the ancient world. Her recent book The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Harvard University Press, 2008) introduces a note of mystery and uncertainty into what we think we know about Pompeii and the lives of ancient Romans. Pompeii was not frozen in amber, she argues. Its history stretches back centuries before the 79 A.D. eruption of Vesuvius, and it bears the marks of later excavations. “The bigger picture and many of the more basic questions about the town remain very murky indeed,” she writes. Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens recently interviewed Beard about her work and popular perceptions of the distant past.

Randall Stephens: Do you remember your first visit to Pompeii?

Mary Beard: I have a very vivid memory of my first visit. I went with a friend. I’d been studying Pompeii at Cambridge as an undergraduate, and she hadn’t. I was going to be the guide. I was devastated when we got there. So much of what I’d learned, particularly about the art and the wall decorations, had been made to seem so clear and so important and so sort of fixed. But none of the stuff I saw in Pompeii matched what I’d learned. There seemed to be a huge gap between people’s desire to explain it and systematize it and what you actually saw when you walked around.

Stephens: In The Fires of Vesuvius you write, “The fact is that we know both a lot more and a lot less about Pompeii than we think.” Could you say a little about what you mean here?
Beard: What is amazing about Pompeii is that you can walk around and try to reconstruct the life of the town. I remember walking down the street a few years ago and noticing little holes drilled in the curbstones, often outside houses, but not always. I’d never seen these mentioned in books. My husband and I started trying to hash this puzzle out, and we decided that they must be where they tied up animals. There had to be tethering posts because there were loads of mules and other animals going through the city. I eventually found a few articles debating what they were. So all you need to do is go to Pompeii with your eyes open and say: “I wonder what that was.”

Stephens: Even ancient graffiti, which you point out is so ubiquitous at Pompeii, gives us a more complex picture of this world than one might think.

Beard: You can go into a house and, even if you don’t read Latin, you can see that some of the graffiti scrolled on these walls is about three feet high. Well, that’s obviously someone kneeling down, or it’s a child—much more likely a child. I think there’s an enormous amount of fun in trusting your innate powers of observation and going from there.

Stephens: The layers of interpretation and the layers of ruins that you’ve uncovered in the book are intriguing. How much of what we know of Pompeii is shaped by what happened after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius?

Beard: It has an interesting history after the eruption—in the period, that is, when we think of Pompeii as happily asleep, waiting for rediscovery. While I’m suspicious of the view that the Romans undertook an enormous and systematic rescue operation soon after the eruption, it seems extremely likely that salvagers came to get the really valuable stuff—statues from the forum, and so on. It must have been frightfully dangerous, and some of them almost certainly died in the attempt because the tunnels would have collapsed. Some of the bodies that you can now see—casts of bodies made where their remains left a vacuum in the lava—are almost certainly bodies of looters, not those of the unfortunate Pompeii victims. . . .

Summer Travels in Roman Western Europe

Randall Stephens

In time for the summer travel season Elaine Sciolino writes an interesting piece on "Roman France" in the NYT travel section.

Over the years, I have discovered traces of Roman civilization throughout the country, from Arras in the north to Dijon in the center and Fréjus in the south. My hunt for Roman Gaul has turned up treasures in the oddest places, including the middle of wheat fields, the foundations of churches and the basements of dusty provincial museums. . . .

If French history books tend to underplay ancient Roman rule, local politicians and entrepreneurs in the south do not. In the summer, area restaurants offer “Roman” menus with 2,000-year-old recipes: dishes prepared with cumin, coriander, mint and honey.

The article features a map with key sites marked out and a slide show. Related pieces include: "Traces from When Paris Was Roman" (May 17, 2009); and "Amid the Glory of France, the Grandeur that Was Rome" (May 17, 2009).

There's plenty to see across the channel, too. About a year ago Kevin Rushby wrote about a short trip he and his four-year-old daughter made to Hadrian's Wall and the Housteads fort, "England's Great Wall" Guardian, March 29, 2008. The serpentine wall is UN World Heritage site and a fascinating window into the distant past.

Built around AD124 in a commanding position on a swathe of the dramatic Whin Sill escarpment, Housesteads is one of the most important sites of Roman remains in Britain, in its day the last decent bath house before the great unwashed of Caledonia. . . .

Many interesting finds have come from the fort, even more from the settlement of hangers-on clustered below its walls. Two counterfeiting coin moulds from the 3rd century AD were discovered next to the remains of a house, the forger's den. Under his floor were two skeletons, one with a knife still stuck in the ribs.

Roman Holiday

Barry Strauss

According to ancient tradition, the city of Rome had a birthday. It was founded on April 21 in what, according to the most common version, was the year 753 B.C. We don’t have to trust the story in order to use the date as a reason to ponder ancient Rome’s legacy.

If we ask, as Monty Python did, “what have the Romans ever done for us?” we might be surprised at the answer. Truth to tell, we might be surprised at the question. Rome is better known these days as the center of the Catholic Church and the capital of Italy than as one of the twin fountainheads of the West (the other, of course, is Greece). Yet we needn’t probe too deeply in order to find that conviction.

Americans, for example, haven’t gotten over their pride at (or fear of) being the new Rome. Despite numerous obituaries, Latin is alive and well as a subject of study in schools and universities. Nor can the story of Christian origins be told outside the Roman context. Meanwhile, both Islamic and Jewish histories assign a major role to Rome or its successor state, the Byzantine Empire (also known as Rome and, rightly so, since the “Byzantines” called themselves Romans). Rome still matters.

With that in mind, here is an exercise in civic literacy: two sets of questions about the legacy of ancient Rome. The first set consists of traditional problems while the second features new scholarly approaches. They cover a wide range of subjects, but, I fear, not wide enough to hide my own limitations. To begin with:

1. What was the constitution of the Roman Republic? Was it a democracy, oligarchy or so-called mixed regime? Why did the American Founders lean so heavily on the Roman Republic as a model? Did they understand the reality of the Republic or were they misinformed?
2. How (and why) did Rome, a small city-state in Central Italy, conquer an empire that covered the shores of the Mediterranean and stretched from Britain to Iraq? Why were the legions so successful? Did Rome’s empire bring the blessings of peace (the famous pax Romana) or did the Roman historian Tacitus get it right when he had one of Rome’s enemies say of Rome “They make a desert and call it peace” (Agricola 98).
3. Why did Rome’s republican government collapse and why was it replaced by a monarchy?
4. To what extent was Rome an original culture? To what extent did it merely absorb, codify and preserve the culture of Greece?
5. To what extent was Rome a slave society? How can we admire a slave society today?
6. At its height, the city of Rome was the largest and most powerful city in the world, with a population of over a million people. What was life there like?
7. Why and how did Rome change from paganism to Christianity?
8. Why did the Roman Empire in the West decline and fall? Why did it survive in the East as the Byzantine Empire? Is “decline and fall” the right way to think of the fate of the Roman Empire in the West or is “transformation and change” a better model?

Here is the second set of questions:

9. What new evidence and new methodologies are uncovering the ancient environment and ecology? Was environmental pollution a problem in the Roman era?
10. How is the evidence of material culture revealing the lives of Roman women, including working women? How is it adding to the history of the Roman family? Roman childhood?
11. How are archaeology and anthropology opening a window into the medical dimension of Roman life? How advanced were Roman science, technology, and engineering?
12. How can we explain the brutal phenomenon of gladiatorial games? What new evidence do we have of a gladiator’s life?
13. What new evidence and models are there for the ancient economy? How did it support the Empire’s large population? For that matter, what advances in demography allow us to chart that population?
14. How is new research filling in the picture of the lives of the Italian peoples whom Rome conquered: e.g., Bruttians, Celts, Etruscans, Greeks, Lucanians, Samnites? Likewise, how is new research illustrating the lives of the peoples outside of Italy whom Rome conquered or whom Rome fought and failed to conquer: e.g., Carthaginians, Celts, Germans, Greeks, Jews, Persians, Thracians? What special contribution to Roman history does the extraordinarily well-preserved evidence of Roman Egypt make?
15. What new insights emerge from a comparison of the Roman Empire with Han Dynasty China? What new evidence has been found of Roman trade in goods and ideas with such countries as India, China, Arabia, and Kush?
16. How is new research describing the experience of Roman battle?
These questions offer a glimpse of the subject, not an overview. But birthday parties only start the new year.

Barry Strauss teaches ancient history at Cornell University. His most recent book is The Spartacus War (Simon & Schuster, 2009). He blogs at http://www.barrystrauss.com/blog/.