ARCHAEOLOGY OF ANCIENT ROME

Pompeii

Not until the 1800s did archaeologists begin digging up Rome. In 1462, Pope Pius II praised classical ruins for their “exemplary frailty” and issued an edict to protect them.” As part of his effort to link his regime to ancient Rome, Mussolini sponsored excavations in Rome and Ostia and drained an entire lake to get at a luxurious ship built by the Roman emperor Caligula that rested on the bottom of it.

A shocking number of paintings and painted signs in Pompeii have vanished after being exposed to air sort of the like the subway-excavation scene in “Fellini’s Roma” When a skeleton is found in the Naples area sometimes it takes a little sorting out to determine whether it belongs to an organized crime victim or the member of an ancient culture.

Roman archaeology excavations are being carried in all kinds of places—England, Germany, Turkey, Tunisia—giving one a sense of great size and lasting impact of the Roman Empire. Scholars sometimes use hairstyles to date objects.

There is lot more materials and sources for the study of the ancient Romans than there is for the study of the ancient Greeks. Most of the Roman sources are from the members of the ruling elite. There generally is not much information on the lower classes and how they lived. Archaeologists and historians warn that in the study of ancient Rome it is important to tread carefully and go only as far as the data takes you, understanding the limits and realizing the fragility of the constructs and presence of contradictions.

Websites on Ancient Rome: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; Lacus Curtius penelope.uchicago.edu; The Internet Classics Archive classics.mit.edu ; Bryn Mawr Classical Review bmcr.brynmawr.edu; Cambridge Classics External Gateway to Humanities Resources web.archive.org; Ancient Rome resources for students from the Courtenay Middle School Library web.archive.org ; History of ancient Rome OpenCourseWare from the University of Notre Dame web.archive.org ; United Nations of Roma Victrix (UNRV) History unrv.com

Archaeology in Rome Itself

One of the last great undiscovered and little-explored archaeological sites in Italy is underneath Rome. In Roman-era brick sewers are 2000-year-old amphorae next to broken beer bottles in spaces that smell of urine, mud, oil and rotting rat carcasses. The surviving Maxima (“the Great Drain”), a sewer built below the Forum, is one of the oldest surviving structures in Rome yet parts of it have never been mapped or explored. [Source: Paul Bennett, National Geographic, July 2006]

Other areas that have not been thoroughly investigated include the Aqua Virgo, the only aqueduct in Rome still in use after 20 centuries; the La Chioccila (“the snail shell”), spiral staircase that leads to the Aqua Virgo; an A.D. 2nd century building beside the Circus Maximus, with an almost completely intact cave-like room with a bull statue used for bull sacrifices to honor the god Mithras; and a room full of exquisite mosaic walls with image sf half-naked men stamping grapes under Nero’s Golden House

Over the centuries buildings have been built on top of one another with important monuments often lying on top of other important monuments, For example the basilica of San Clemente today lies on top of an earlier church destroyed when the Normans sacked Rome in 1084. The church in turn was built on top of an A.D. 4th century house where Christians met which was built on top of a shrine to the Roman god Mithras.

Some places are 15 meters higher than they were when Rome was established. Much of Rome sits on a flood plain, at a bend in the Tiber River. Although the Romans built levees the city was periodically flooded. Layers of sediment deposited during the floods raised the level of the city as did the practice of building new roads and buildings on top of old ones.

If you dig a hole almost anywhere in Rome there is good chance you will uncover something of archaeological significance. Every year 13,000 requests for building permits are submitted, with each requiring archaeology evaluation. The Beni Culturali, the government ministry that oversees archaeology, is underfunded and understaffed and often under great pressure to do their work as quickly as possible so as not to cause too many delays and cost overruns for developers and construction companies. They are sometimes aided by volunteers, who sometimes run in front of backhoes to pluck out amphorae fragments and other artifacts before they are possible lost forever at the hands of construction crews.

Roma Sotterranea is an urban speleological group that is called in to inspect new finds and underground sites. One of the leading underground explorers is Luca Atoggnoli, an Italian surgeon who takes the potential risk of his hobby very seriously. Before he drops below the surface he makes sure every inch of his body is covered with gloves, boots, a hooded wind suit, and mask—all hermetically sealed with duct tape. These days robots are often deployed to check sites before people go in.

Romulus and Remus Story, Fact?

House of Romulus on Palatine Hill in Rome

According to legend Palatine Hill is where Romulus and Remus were suckled by their she wolf mother and where Rome was founded in the 8th century B.C., when Romulus killed Remus there. The most interesting piece in the Capitoline Museum in Rome is a famous Etruscan bronze of a crazy-eyed she-wolf being. Renaissance depictions of Romulus and Remus were added to the statue in the 15th century.

Tradition places the founding of Rome in the year 753 B.C., when Romulus erected the first walls of the so-called Roma Quadrata, or “square Rome.” Italian archeologist Andrea Carandin, who has been in charge of several important excavations in the most ancient parts of Rome, draws on his findings to offer a highly speculative reconstruction of its founding in “In “Rome: Day One” (Princeton). Adam Kirsch wrote in The New Yorker:“It has been a very long time since anyone took this account as an accurate historical description. But Carandini provocatively suggests that it might be more or less true. Romulus did not create Rome out of nothing, he grants, but it is possible that there was a single day, around the middle of the eighth century B.C., when sacred ceremonies were held to transform a collection of settlements into the city of Rome. Carandini believes that inscribed artifacts he discovered on the Palatine Hill bear out the ancient tradition that Romulus used a team of oxen to dig the outlines of a murus sanctus, a sacred wall, on the future site of Rome. And the culmination of these ceremonies, Carandini writes, was human sacrifice: “Once the walls were completed, a little girl was sacrificed and her attributes were buried under the threshold.” It was the discovery of this “foundational deposit,” in particular a cup, that enabled Carandini “to date the completion of the walls to the second quarter of the eighth century B.C.,” close to the traditional date of Rome’s founding. [Source: Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, January 2, 2012]

John Noble Wilford wrote in the New York Times, “The story of Romulus and Remus is almost as old as Rome. The orphan twins were suckled by a she-wolf in a cave on the banks of the Tiber. Romulus grew up to found Rome in 753 B. C. Historians have long since dismissed the story as a charming legend. The 19th-century historian Theodor Mommsen said: “The founding of the city in the strict sense, such as the legend assumes, is of course to be reckoned out of the question: Rome was not built in a day." Yet the legend is as imperishable as Mommsen's skeptical verdict, and it has been invigorated by recent archaeological finds. [Source: John Noble Wilford, New York Times, June 12, 2007]

In 2007, Italian archaeologists reported discovering the long-lost cave under the Palatine Hill that ancient Romans held sacred as the place where the twins were nursed. The grown brothers fought over leadership of the new city, the story goes, and Romulus killed Remus and became the first king.

Ancient Roman Statues Found in British Ambassador's Garden in Rome

A collection of 350 ancient Roman statues and marble friezes were found after a three-year restoration of a garden belonging to the British ambassador's residence. Nick Squires wrote in The Telegraph: “For decades they were hidden beneath a jungle of overgrown vegetation, coated in lichen and moss, but now hundreds of delicate Roman statues and other marble artefacts have emerged from a painstaking restoration of the garden of the British ambassador's residence in Rome. Carved reliefs of wild boar, satyrs, griffons and goddesses were discovered mouldering beneath soil and leaf litter during the laborious landscaping of the garden of Villa Wolkonsky, which was once the home of a Russian princess. “As gardeners hacked through the tangled vegetation, they discovered more than 350 artefacts – far more than they had expected to find. [Source: Nick Squires, The Telegraph, 10 Dec 2014]

“The marble statues and funerary reliefs, once covered in slime and moss, were cleaned by experts and went on display on Wednesday for the first time in the gardens of the villa, a historic palazzo which has been the residence of the British ambassador to Italy since the end of the Second World War. They include stone reliefs from ancient Roman tombs that depict the faces of freed slaves, their wives and children, as well as carved friezes showing chariot races and the ritual sacrifice of bulls.

“The three-year restoration of the 10-acre garden was led by Nina Prentice, a keen horticulturalist and the wife of the ambassador, Christopher Prentice. "I was weeding from the age of two," she told The Telegraph in the grounds of the residence, which are shaded by holm oak trees and palms. Rather than delegate the project to embassy employees, she performed much of the back-breaking digging and clearing of overgrown shrubs herself.

“Working methodically through the garden, which is enclosed on one side by the well-preserved remains of a 1st century A.D. aqueduct built by the Emperor Claudius, she came across the marble carvings. Many of the artefacts came from a nearby Roman necropolis and were used to decorate the garden when it was owned in the early 19th century by Zenaida Wolkonsky, a Russian princess who entertained the likes of Gogol, Goethe, Stendhal and Sir Walter Scott.

Carthaginian naval ram

“Mrs Prentice found ancient sarcophagi used as plant pots and Roman capitols wedged underneath slabs of marble to form benches. "Everything had slid into ruin and was covered in muck," Mrs Prentice said, walking past a grotto in which Nikolai Gogol is believed to have composed part of Dead Souls, a classic of Russian literature. "Every time we ventured into a different part of the garden, there would be another amazing statue. I just kept saying to myself, 'I can't believe it.' "There were bits scattered all over the place so we had to match hands with arms and heads with bodies."

“Many of the pieces that were rediscovered are important from an artistic and archaeological point of view, experts said. "There's a sarcophagus with a lion's head from the imperial period that is of very high quality," said Prof Christopher Smith, the director of the British School at Rome, an archaeological institute. Dr Dirk Booms, a curator from the British Museum, said: "The funerary relief showing five freed slaves and a child is very rare. They have Greek names, suggesting they were Greek slaves who were freed by their Roman owners. The collection is an important part of the story of Rome."

“After falling on hard times as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Wolkonsky family sold the villa and its gardens to the German government, who used it as their embassy in Rome. During the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1943 and 1944, its underground bomb shelter is thought to have been used to hold Italian civilians, some of whom were reportedly tortured by the Gestapo. Others were shot when they tried to escape from the villa's tennis court, where they had been temporarily held after a Gestapo sweep of the city. The palazzo was confiscated from the Germans after the war and soon taken over by the British, who moved in after the existing British embassy was blown up by Irgun, the Zionist terrorist group fighting for a Jewish homeland, in 1946. It later became the residence of the British ambassador, after the embassy was transferred to a modern, concrete building about a mile away in 1971.”

Archaeologist Make Important Finds Related to Punic Wars’ Sea Battle

Andrew Curry wrote in Archaeology magazine: “The Battle of the Aegates Islands in 241 B.C. was a naval battle fought between the fleets of Carthage and the Roman Republic during the First Punic War. It was a victory for the Romans that would lead to their domination in the years to come. Rome lacked a fleet — the ships it had possessed had been destroyed in a previous battle. Yet their enemies, the Carthaginian forces, did little to capitalise on this, allowing Rome to restore its strength and build a new stronger fleet. When the Carthaganians heard about this, they prepared their fleet for battle, and sailed to the Aegates Islands,” also called the Egadi Island, west of Sicily. “The Romans sailed out to meet them - but not before stripping their vessels of sails and masts to give them an advantage in rough sea conditions, By ramming into their enemy's ships and destroying half of the fleet, the Romans won a decisive victory. It was the last battle in the First Punic War, which had raged for 20 years as the two powers fought for supremacy over the western Mediterranean Sea. [Source: Andrew Curry, Archaeology , Volume 65 Number 1, January/February 2012

“As Polybius tells it, the war came to a head in 242 B.C., with both powers exhausted and nearly broke after two decades of fighting. The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca—the father of a later adversary of Rome, Hannibal—was pinned down on a mountaintop above the city of Drepana, now the Sicilian town of Trapani. As the Carthaginians assembled a relief force, the Romans scraped together the money for a fleet to cut them off. According to Polybius, in March 241 B.C., the two sides met in between the , a trio of rocky outcrops a few miles off the coast of Sicily. The clash brought hundreds of ships and thousands of men together in a battle that helped shape the course of history.

The battle lasted only a few hours.“While the Carthagnians were much more powerful on the water, the cunning Romans lay in wait trapping the Carthaginians and blocking off their sea route in a sudden victorious attack. Heather Ramsey of Listverse wrote: “With their 300 maneuverable ships, the Romans ambushed the enemy fleet and blocked their route. Only 250 of the 700 Carthaginian vessels were warships; the rest carried supplies. By the end of the swift battle, 70 Carthaginian ships were captured, 50 were sunk, and the remainder were able to escape.” Maybe 10,000 men were killed. [Source: Heather Ramsey, Listverse, March 4, 2015]

Place Where Julius Caesar was Stabbed Found

place where Caesar was stabbed

2012, archaeologists with Spanish National Research Council announced that they had found the spot where it is believed that Julius Caesar was stabbed discovered: a concrete structure in the monumental complex of Torre Argentina in Rome. Stephanie Pappas wrote in Live Science: “Archaeologists have unearthed a concrete structure nearly 10 feet wide and 6.5 feet tall that may have been erected by Augustus, Julius Caesar's successor, to condemn the assassination. [Source: Stephanie Pappas, Live Science, October 11, 2012 +++]

“The structure is at the base of the Curia, or Theater, of Pompey, the spot where classical writers reported the stabbing took place. "We always knew that Julius Caesar was killed in the Curia of Pompey on March 15th 44 B.C. because the classical texts pass on so, but so far no material evidence of this fact, so often depicted in historicist painting and cinema, had been recovered," Antonio Monterroso, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, said in a statement. +++

“Classical texts also say that years after the assassination, the Curia was closed and turned into a memorial chapel for Caesar. The researchers are studying this building along with another monument in the same complex, the Portico of the Hundred Columns, or Hecatostylon; they are looking for links between the archaeology of the assassination and what has been portrayed in art. "It is very attractive, in a civic and citizen sense, that thousands of people today take the bus and the tram right next to the place where Julius Caesar was stabbed 2,056 years ago," Monterroso said.” +++

Archaeological Work at the Colosseum

Tom Mueller wrote in Smithsonian magazine, “By the early 19th century, the hypogeum's floor lay buried under some 40 feet of earth, and all memory of its function — or even its existence — had been obliterated. In 1813 and 1874, archaeological excavations attempting to reach it were stymied by flooding groundwater. Finally, under Benito Mussolini's glorification of Classical Rome in the 1930s, workers cleared the hypogeum of earth for good. [Source: Tom Mueller, Smithsonian magazine, January 2011]

Heinz-Jürgen Beste of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome and his colleagues spent four years using measuring tapes, plumb lines, spirit levels and generous quantities of paper and pencils to produce technical drawings of the entire hypogeum. “Today we'd probably use a laser scanner for this work, but if we did, we'd miss the fuller understanding that old-fashioned draftsmanship with pencil and paper gives you," Beste says. “When you do this slow, stubborn drawing, you're so focused that what you see goes deep into the brain. Gradually, as you work, the image of how things were takes shape in your subconscious."

Colosseum

Unraveling the site's tangled history, Beste identified four major building phases and numerous modifications over nearly 400 years of continuous use. Colosseum architects made some changes to allow new methods of stagecraft. Other changes were accidental;a fire sparked by lightning in A.D. 217 gutted the stadium and sent huge blocks of travertine plunging into the hypogeum. Beste also began to decipher the odd marks and incisions in the masonry, having had a solid grounding in Roman mechanical engineering from excavations in southern Italy, where he learned about catapults and other Roman war machines. He also studied the cranes that the Romans used to move large objects, such as 18-foot-tall marble blocks.

Tom Mueller wrote in Smithsonian magazine, When Beste and a team of German and Italian archaeolgists first began exploring the hypogeum, in 1996, he was baffled by the intricacy and sheer size of its structures: “I understood why this site had never been properly analyzed before then. Its complexity was downright horrifying." [Source: Tom Mueller, Smithsonian magazine, January 2011]

The disarray reflected some 1,500 years of neglect and haphazard construction projects, layered one upon another. After the last gladiatorial spectacles were held in the sixth century, Romans quarried stones from the Colosseum, which slowly succumbed to earthquakes and gravity. Down through the centuries, people filled the hypogeum with dirt and rubble, planted vegetable gardens, stored hay and dumped animal dung. In the amphitheater above, the enormous vaulted passages sheltered cobblers, blacksmiths, priests, glue-makers and money-changers, not to mention a fortress of the Frangipane, 12th-century warlords. By then, local legends and pilgrim guidebooks described the crumbling ring of the amphitheater's walls as a former temple to the sun. Necromancers went there at night to summon demons.

Ground-Penetrating Radar Maps Entire Ancient Roman City

In June 2020, scientists announced that they had used ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to map an entire ancient Roman city — Falerii Novi, a walled city spanning 75 acres (30.5 hectares) about 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Rome — revealing remarkable details of buildings deep underground including a temple and a unique public monument. Falerii Novi was founded in 241 B.C. during the time of the Roman Republic and was inhabited until around 700 AD in the early Middle Ages. It was the the first time GPR was used to map a complete ancient city. [Source: Will Dunham, Reuters, June 9, 2020]

GPR technology, which allows researchers to explore large-scale archeological sites without excavation, which can be costly and time-consuming, can "see" beneath the surface using a radar antenna that sends a pulsed radio signal into the ground and listens for the echoes bouncing off objects. The GPR equipment was pulled over the surface using an all-terrain vehicle. “"This took one person about three to four months in the field," said Martin Millett, a University of Cambridge classical archaeology professor who helped lead the study published in the journal Antiquity. "This really does change how we can study and understand Roman towns — the way of the future for archaeology."

According to Reuters: Falerii Novi, not quite half the size of ancient Pompeii, had previously been partially excavated but most remained buried. With a population of perhaps 3,000 people, it boasted an unexpectedly elaborate public bath complex and market building, at least 60 large houses and a rectangular temple with columns near the city's south gate. Near the north gate was a public monument unlike any other known, with a colonnaded portico on three sides and a large open square measuring 130 by 300 feet (40 by 90 meters). Falerii Novi had a network of water pipes running beneath the city blocks and not just along streets, indicating coordinated city planning.

Roman Shopping List Deciphered with Virtual Technology

In 2001, researchers at Oxford University announced that they had have deciphered a Roman soldier's shopping list,dated to A.D. 75-125, using virtual technology. Anna Salleh wrote on ABC Science Online: “The discovery is part of a project by Oxford University researchers to identify the markings on hundreds of Roman letters, contracts and other documents found in the 1970s by excavators at Hadrian's Wall. The documents were originally written in wax on wooden tablets but after 2000 years, the wax has degraded and all that remains of many of the scripts are faint scratches in the pieces of wood. [Source: Anna Salleh, ABC Science Online, March 5, 2001 +] “Oxford historian, Dr Roger Tomlin deciphered one of the documents and found it to be a shopping list for a Roman solider. It reveals that to buy a clothing outfit at auction, an average Roman soldier would have paid 8 percent of his yearly income (25 denarii). He would have had to fork out another 10 percent for a cloak to protect him from Britain's hostile climate. +\

“In order to read the stylus marks on each tablet, the researchers managed to exaggerate the faint scratchings. Using virtual technology they eliminated the wood grain from the tablets. By using low, focussed light, they identified the scratches by analysing their highlighted edges and the shadows they cast. Next, the researchers aim to develop a computer program that will help them to assess the probability that certain scratches in the wood are particular letters, speeding up the time taken to read more tablets.” +\

Catacomb Archaeology

Catacombs in Savinilla

Catacombs are underground burial chambers, especially associated with Rome. There are tens of thousands of ancient catacombs — where early Christians buried their dead and sustained hope for eternal life — deep below the streets of present-day Rome lie the . According to Associated Press: “Rome has dozens of such catacombs. Early Christians dug the catacombs outside Rome's walls as underground cemeteries, since burial was forbidden inside the city walls and pagan Romans were usually cremated. The art that decorated Rome's catacombs was often simplistic and symbolic in nature. The Santa Tecla catacombs, however, represent some of the earliest evidence of devotion to the apostles in early Christianity. "The Christian catacombs, while giving us value with a religious and cultural patrimony, represent an eloquent and significant testimony of Christianity at its origin," said Monsignor Giovanni Carru, the No. 2 in the Vatican's Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology, which maintains the catacombs. [Source: Associated Press, June 22, 2010]

On one Vatican-sponsored archaeological project in the catacombs, Associated Press reported: “The Vatican's Sacred Archaeology office oversaw and paid for the two-year, euro 60,000 restoration effort, which for the first time used lasers to restore frescoes in catacombs. The damp air of underground catacombs makes preservation of paintings particularly difficult and restoration problematic. [Source: Associated Press, June 22, 2010 +++]

“In this case, the small burial chamber at the end of the catacomb was completely encased in centimeters (inches) of white calcium carbonate. Restoring the paintings underneath using previous techniques would have meant scraping away the calcium buildup by hand. That technique, though would have left a filmy calcium layer on top so as to not damage the paintings underneath.

“Using the laser, restorers were able to sear off all the calcium that had been bound onto the painting because the laser beam was concentrated on a chromatic selection: the white of the calcium carbonate deposits. The laser's heat stopped when it reached a different color. That enabled researchers to easily chip off the seared white calcium carbonate, which then revealed the brilliant ochre, black, green and yellow underneath unscathed, she said. +++

“Similar technology has been used for over a decade on statues, particularly metallic ones damaged by years of outdoor pollution, she said. The Santa Tecla restoration, however, marked the first time the lasers had been adapted for use in the dank interiors of catacombs. The protocol used, she said, would now be used as a model for similar underground restorations where the damage was similar to that found at Santa Tecla, which she said was the most common type of damage found in Rome's catacombs. +++

Evidence of Crucifixion

physical evidence of crucifixion

Professor L. Michael White told PBS: “Crucifixion was something very, very real. There are too many ancient sources that talk about it. Josephus himself describes a number of crucifixions that took place in Judea at about this time. So we can be fairly confident [of the crucifixion] as a historical event because it was a very commonplace affair in those days and very gruesome. Now different medical historians and other archaeological kinds of research have given us several different ways of understanding the actual practice of crucifixion. [Source: L. Michael White, Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies Program University of Texas at Austin, Frontline, PBS, April 1998 ]

“In all probability the feet were nailed either directly through the ankles or through the heel bone to the lower post of the cross. The hands or the arms might be tied rather than nailed. It depends but it suggests really that crucifixion was a very slow and agonizing form of death. It's not from bleeding. It's not from the wounds themselves that the death occurs. It's rather a suffocation because one can't hold oneself up enough to breathe properly, and so over time really it's really the exposure to the elements and the gradual loss of breath that produces death. It's an agonizing death at that.

“... [E]vidence of crucifixion in archaeological form has been rare until the discovery that was made in recent times of an actual bone from a coffin which was found to have a nail still stuck in it. This is apparently someone who actually did experience crucifixion. .... Now what apparently happened was the nail that had been used to put him on the cross by being placed through his heel bone had stuck against a knot or bent in some way and so they couldn't pull it out without really causing massive tearing of the tissue and so they left it in, and as a result we have one of those few pieces of evidence that show us what the practice was really like.”

Dubious Ancient Roman Archaeological Finds

Debra Kelly wrote for Listverse: “If it’s real, the Praeneste Fibula would be perhaps the earliest Latin inscription ever found. According to Wolfgang Helbig, the scholar who presented it to Rome’s German Institute in 1886, the gold dress pin had been discovered in 1871 at a site dating to the 6th century B.C. He didn’t tell them the whole story, though, leaving out the fact that he had acquired it from Francesco Martinetti: smuggler, forger, and seller of less-than-reputable antiquities. When that bit of information got out, the pin started to look a little suspicious. [Source: Debra Kelly, Listverse, May 9, 2016]

“For starters, it was supposedly found in the Bernardini Tomb, which was excavated in 1876, not 1871. Helbig wasn’t able to explain where in the tomb it was found or who discovered it. But he had a good reputation as an archeologist and suspicions about the pin were mostly ignored until 1980, when expert Margherita Guarducci undertook a detailed study of the piece. Guarducci found that the gold used in the pin had been treated with an acid, presumably to make it look old. Otherwise, it didn’t resemble any other ancient gold found in the area. And the inscription itself bore a striking resemblance to samples of Helbig’s own handwriting.

“Martinetti was definitely shady—his house was torn down after his death, revealing countless fakes hidden inside. But why would a respected scholar like Helbig help Martinetti deal in forgeries? Especially since he was married to a wealthy Russian princess and definitely didn’t need money. The writer William Calder speculated that he might have been subject to blackmail, thanks to his regular visits to the house of art collector Edward Perry Warren, where “women were not welcomed.”

“But that’s just speculation and experts are now beginning to think that Helbig might be vindicated after all. In 2011, the Prehistoric and Ethnographic National Museum held a round table of experts in the hopes of getting to the bottom of the matter of the pin once and for all. Their decision, made with the benefit of new technology not available to Guarducci, was that the pin was absolutely authentic, inscription and all.

“A Pevensey Brick is currently in the collection of the British Museum—with the addendum that it’s “probably a fake.” The artifact is one of at least two fired clay bricks or tiles stamped with the letters “HON AVG ANDRIA” found in Pevensey, Sussex. If the bricks are real, they would be evidence of the last major building project before the Romans abandoned Britain in the reign of Emperor Honorius. It is assumed that “HON AVG” stands for “Honorius Augustus,” with “ANDRIA” standing for a previously undated Roman shore fort known as Anderida.

“The problems start with the man who supposedly discovered the bricks: Charles Dawson. If that name sounds familiar, its because Dawson also “discovered” the Piltdown Man fossil, one of the most infamous hoaxes in archeological history. The lettered bricks were apparently discovered during an excavation he carried out in 1902. We’re not even sure how many of them Dawson claimed to have found. Records detail the existence of three, with suggestions of a fourth, but there are currently only two confirmed examples in the British Museum and the Lewes Museum. Tests now indicate that the bricks were probably made sometime in the last 350 years, although the Lewes brick at least seems to have been repaired, leading to suggestions that the tests could be inaccurate. However, the tests and anomalies in the style of the stamping on the bricks seem to indicate that they’re another of Dawson’s fakes.”

Corporate-Sponsored Restoration Raises Alarms About Disneyfication of Rome

“The Colosseum underwent a $33 million restoration project sponsored by and paid for by the luxury leather brand Tod's. Anthony Faiola wrote in the Washington Post: “They have clothed the world’s wealthy fashionistas and bejeweled Hollywood stars. Now, Italy’s kings of fashion are poised to give this nation’s crumbling monuments a makeover to restore them to their former glory, something the cash-strapped Italian government cannot do. [Source: Anthony Faiola, Washington Post, September 7, 2014]

“Fearing the Disneyfication of its landmarks, the Italian government has largely eschewed private donations and sponsorships for upkeep and renovations. But in the face of Italy’s multi-year economic malaise and the gravity of deterioration at some sites, the Italians have done an about-face. Portraying themselves now as merely caretakers of some of humanity’s most important artifacts, they are rallying billionaires, companies and even foreign governments to their cause. Something, everyone agrees, needs to be done. Caked with pollution and, in some cases, falling apart, a number of major sites have long been in jeopardy here. The original color of the Colosseum — an off-ivory in the glory days of Roman gladiators — has been darkened by the exhaust of Rome’s new chariots, cars.

“As the Italians peddle their monuments like so many troubled children in need of sponsors, the dandies of Italian fashion have come to the rescue. They are throwing millions of euros toward desperately needed restorations in exchange for various sponsorship rights, helping spur one of the single-largest periods of archaeological and artistic renewal in modern Italian history.

“The Italian state once viewed national patrimony in highly proprietary terms. But local and national politicians began a major shift two years ago, with massive new tax breaks for restoration donations taking effect this year. It happens as Italy’s own cultural budget has shrunk precipitously under a succession of fraught governments, even as disrepair at landmarks worsened. The fast-deteriorating condition of Pompeii — including a wall that fell down at the Temple of Venus after heavy rain last March — has, for instance, sparked a global outcry from alarmed archaeologists.

“Outside money, the Italians say, is the only answer. The city of Rome, for example, recently struck a preliminary agreement with Saudi Arabia to fund the restoration of the Mausoleum of Augustus. Ignazio Marino, a former transplant surgeon who worked for years in the United States and is the mayor of Rome, will hold a symposium in California this month in a bid to tap Silicon Valley’s tech millionaires for donations. He will argue that the Italians are taking drastic steps to ensure preservation — including his own highly controversial decision to ban cars near the Colosseum to reduce deterioration from vehicle exhaust. “But the world also needs to help,” Marino said. “We cannot do this alone.”

“The national government, meanwhile, is weighing a more substantial new push, including the possibility of allowing private companies to run small museums or archeology sites, and possibly even opening for-profit cafes or bookshops, on site. “In Italy, the list of beauty is infinite,” said Dario Franceschini, Italy’s minister of culture. “And even if this weren’t a time of cuts to public expenditures, Italy’s cultural heritage is too vast. So I don’t really see why we should ever say ‘no’ to opening up to private interests.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated November 2024