The international team of scholars and researchers at the ancient walls of Falerii Novi.Credit: Emlyn Dodd
Posted on 09/19/2022 1:23:14 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
From small coins to tiny pieces of ceramic and even clumps of soil, Seth Bernard and a group of graduate students from the University of Toronto are unearthing a story about how a Roman city founded in 241 BCE lived and breathed through time...
Bernard is part of an international team of scholars exploring "Falerii Novi," an ancient city located about 50 kilometers north of Rome...
Aside from portions of the city's original walls that still stand, the site is a scenic flat plain of agricultural fields and olive groves. But buried underneath is a fascinating history of a city founded more than 2,000 years ago that, at its height, was home to about 15,000 people.
About 35 scholars from different fields were focused on three separate dig sites. One site, overseen by the British School at Rome, focused on one of the city's main streets, which researchers believed included both homes and businesses.
U of T and Harvard students, meanwhile, worked at two separate sites. One is a market building and the other, led by Bernard, is a house believed to be a residence of one of the city's elite families, which later changed functions to accommodate more work-like activities as the centuries passed...
Together, the team wasn't just hunting for artifacts, it was digging for evidence of human interaction...
One of the best examples of this is ceramics, which Bernard calls "the Tupperware of antiquity."
"From these little pieces, you can reconstruct dates and understand importation routes. You can do scientific analysis on the pottery that tells you where it was made, the firing temperature of the kiln and how skilled the person working the kiln was," he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
The international team of scholars and researchers at the ancient walls of Falerii Novi.Credit: Emlyn Dodd
Ground-Penetrating Radar Reveals Entire Ancient Roman City [Falerii Novi]
Gizmodo | Monday, June 8, 2020 | George Dvorsky
Posted on 06/10/2020 12:25:10 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3853975/posts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-DE19gMRtE
One big road trip party. Am I going to have to pay their college loans? Oh, thank goodness it's Canada.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just watch Cleopatra or Gladiator?
We have plenty of insight into Roman life. Hell... We have an entire city encased in volcanic ash.
Thanks for the post. I like the idea of revisiting history with fresh, often unseasoned views. It’s a bad idea to just assume that the last guy that looked at a problem had it right. Sometimes iterating over trodden ground can lead to new insights. This is especially true in disciplines where there has been significant progress since the last review.
Take a look at the images from the ground penetrating radar under these plain green fields:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/falerii-novi
The timing is suspiciously close to the destruction of classical civilization by the Muslims.
Much of coastal cities were destroyed/abandoned because of muslim pirates at about this time.
A Muslim raid against Rome itself occurred in 846 A.D.
Good practice for budding archeology students. No they won’t find anything dramatic but they will get some practice pawing through the dust.
The natives spoke Faliscan, a language closely related to Latin.
If it was destroyed about A.D. 700, perhaps the Lombards were to blame. Or did it just fade away?
Probably started as an infrastructure problem, the maintenance of the water and sewer system in imperial times made those large towns viable and kept them that way. The population scattered into smaller clumps, and the architecture got used as a quarry for later structures.
Well said.
Thanks.
lol
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