Free Republic

Archaeologists have discovered a road in Utrecht that led to the Traiectum fortress in Roman times, which was built about 2,000 years ago on the site of the current Domplein. The discovery was made last week during archeological research in connection with upcoming construction work, the municipality of Utrecht reported on Wednesday. According to the municipality, the find is “of great importance for our knowledge of Roman Utrecht and the border community around it.”The northern border of the Roman Empire went straight through the Netherlands, past the Rijn River. Part of these so-called limes (the Latin word for border) was...

Archaeologists recreated a Pompeiian villa destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. using virtual reality technology to better understand how visitors would have seen the ancient home, according to the recently published paper in the archaeology journal Antiquity. The researchers carefully created a digital model of the ancient home known as the House of the Epigrams, a villa excavated in the 1870s and so named because it contains mythical paintings accompanied by Greek epigrams. While the owner of the house is impossible to know for sure, researchers have suggested it may have belonged to a Lucius Valerius...