Free Republic

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...

A preliminary map of Falerii Novi, an ancient Roman city located 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Rome, has been compiled with data taken from ground-penetrating radar. It's "preliminary" because it wasn't humanly possible for the researchers to fully analyze the 28 billion data points collected during the course of the project, explained Martin Millett, a co-author of the study and an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge... The researchers were able to document the locations of buildings, monuments, passageways, and even water pipes -- all without having to pick up a single hand trowel. In addition to documenting these...