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.>>>

The Two Millenia Miracle

What do you believe about Christmas? At this time of year, billions of people on the planet are celebrating the birth of a baby that happened over two millenia ago in a small town in what we know today as the Middle East. Have you ever stopped to ask a simple question, one that would appear to be logical? That question would be, why?

Let's take a trip back in time. We'll make it a reality trip, one that journeys into the real world of those days and a few more over the ensuing centuries. Starting in first century Bethlehem in Judea, we find it dry and hot. No one exchanged Christmas cards. There were no trees being decorated. No one wore a crucifix around their neck.

Depending on whatever you choose to believe, on one mostly quiet night a teenage girl gave birth in a room, or a cave, or a barn, or a stable. Her child was a son, and she and her older carpenter fiancee would eventually take this child home with them to Nazareth and raise him through boyhood and adolescence into early manhood.

As a man, he would eventually become a preacher and a teacher, extolling men to love one another. Many of his teachings would run counter to the religious and political powers of the day, and he and his followers would eventually be seen as dangerous. He was taken into custody and ultimately killed by crucifixion, typical of political prisoners of Rome in those days.

There is little to suggest on the surface that there is anything special about this story. Baby born in a small town in the middle of nowhere to a teenage single mother grows up to become a somewhat popular preacher and is crucified as thousands of others were who also dared to stand up against the powers-that-be of the day.

In the aftermath of his death, his dozen or so closest followers are afraid for their own lives. They deny knowing him and go into hiding. Over the next few decades they will argue among and splinter apart from one another over how he actually would want them to remember him and continue to spread the word.

A few centuries after his death, with all of those original followers long dead and gone, the mother of a Roman ruler suddenly begins to believe, manages to convert her son, and the once obscure belief system becomes mainstream. What has become known as 'Christianity' grows and spreads.

Over the next 1,600 years the 'Church' of these followers in the teachings of Jesus Christ will explode around the world and across history in numbers of believers, material wealth, and influence. It is estimated that today there are well over 200 million Christians in America, over 76% of the entire population of the United States.

Around the world today there are over 2 billion Christians. One out of ever three people on the planet believe in the deity of that small baby born to that unwed teenage mother in that small town over two thousand years ago. How do you account for that, other than divinely inspired and shepherded miracle?

No matter what the actual day and date may have been, tonight we celebrate the birth of that small boy child. Few could possibly have realized it at the time, but the child born that night in those humble circumstances would be an undeniable light unto the world.

So back to the original question that I asked. What do you believe about Christmas? If you celebrate it, but don't believe in Jesus Christ, then why do you celebrate it? Because everyone else does? That's pretty lame of you. If you don't celebrate it, then how do you account for the miracle of these past two millenia? How do you account for more than 2 billion adherents today? Mass hysteria?

The purpose here was to challenge you to think about not only Christmas, but the particular origination of the holiday, the 'reason for the season', the actual birth of Jesus Christ. Think about how that small child grew into a man about whom it can be legitimately claimed has changed and influenced the world more than any other that ever walked the face of the earth.

The two millenia miracle continues to grow and spread today. Despite constant and increasing attacks on the celebration of Christmas here in America, it cannot be erased from the public consciousness. The reason that Christianity has grown and spread and continues to do so against the forces of secularism, radical Islam, and other sworn enemies is a simple one: it is Truth. Merry Christmas.

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/.

Islamism Series: Goodbye, America

"Imagine a world without the U.S. or Israel, it can happen." That is a publicly pronounced statement by Iranian President and radical islamic idealog Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that I read to my Racial Islam students every week. But is anyone taking him seriously? How could the United States, the acknowledged "most powerful nation in the history of the planet earth" cease to exist? Could a relatively small nation like Iran make something like this happen? I mean, the United States defeated the British against all odds, survived a devastating Civil War, and led the world in overcoming both the Fascism of Hitler's Nazi Germany and the Socialism of the Soviet Union, a pair of legitimate world military powers. Well, it might be pretty difficult for Iran, at least acting on it's own, to make America completely disappear as a nation. However, to think that we are invulnerable from a devastating attack from them would be to act with naivete, and that is something that we must not allow to happen. Because not only can Iran cause widespread devastation and seriously cripple, if not destroy, the United States as a superpower, but they are actively engaged in efforts to make that happen. Throughout history, even single mighty empire that has ever come along has fallen. Does Egypt still exist? Sure. Does Rome still exist? Of course. Is Britain still a strong peopled nation? Most definitely. But the fact of the matter is that not one of these is the major force in the world today, and at one time in history each one was the dominant power in the world. For the United States to fail to learn this lesson of history is for the United States to doom itself to repeat the process, and to one day either cease to exist or find itself a secondary nation. America faces many dangers in this process, including losing it's own unique national identity from within by continually sacrificing our traditions, laws, and language on the mantle of multi-culturalism. But the specific threat the Iranians can and are planning is nuclear. Ahmadinejad is doing everything in his power to obtain nuclear power. Of course it's for peaceful energy purposes if you ask him. This is the same guy that has said publicly that "Israel must be wiped off the map", "it will one day vanish", and "it is a tree that will be eliminated by one storm." What exactly do you think he is talking about here, and when he speaks of a world without the U.S.? The plan that Iran hopes to enact involves what is known as an 'EMP' attack on the United States. Iran would continue to develop their nuclear program to the point where they can construct a couple of nuclear bombs. They are already testing missile technology that would allow them to reach the continental United States from a sea-going vessel. Their plan would be to fire one of those missiles with an attached nuke at our country. Not at a city like New York, trying to blowup infrastructure. No, all that would do is make us angry and lead to their self-destruction. While some of these crazed islamists will give up their lives for the cause, the entire leadership is not suicidal. What they will do instead is launch this nuke so that it explodes in the atmosphere above our country, instantly creating what is known as an 'EMP' effect. In a report released earlier this year by a commission appointed by Congress after the 9/11 attacks to study just such a scenario, the following results were released: "If even a crude nuclear weapon were detonated anywhere between 40 kilometers to 400 kilometers above the earth, in a split-second it would generate an electro-magnetic pulse [EMP] that would cripple military and civilian communications, power, transportation, water, food, and other infrastructure." It wouldn't cause many immediate deaths or damage many buildings, but it would cause electric, gas, lighting, and water systems to fail. Committee spokesperson Dr. William Graham says that the result would be that the United States “would quickly revert to an early 19th century type of country, except that we would have 10 times as many people with ten times fewer resources. Most of the things we depend upon would be gone, and we would literally be depending on our own assets and those we could reach by walking to them.” Basically with the launch of one strategically placed weapon, the Iranians would eliminate the United States as a superpower. They would then turn their remaining arsenal on Israel, eliminating this much smaller nation from existence. Iran could do this openly as a nation, or they could farm the dirty work out to a terrorist organization and try to claim that they had no knowledge of the plot. Make no mistake about the intentions of the current Iranian regime, or the intentions of radical islamists the world over. They want the world under Islamic rule and law, and they will do whatever it takes to overcome those standing in the way of making it happen. The U.S. government and military, and all of us as citizens, need to be aware of and understand exactly what we are up against if we are going to preserve our great nation and it's strength in world affairs. If we refuse to meet this challenge, it will be goodbye America. At least to the America that we all know and love.