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The tomb, unearthed by a team from the French Jean Berard Centre in Naples in southern Italy, dates back to the Samnite era, and is located at the Herculaneaum Gate at Pompeii. The Samnites were a group of tribes involved in fierce battles with the Romans in the fourth century BC. The tomb contained a number of vases and amphoras in perfect condition which give a rare insight into the funerary practices of that era in Pompeii. This discovery allows us “to carry out research on a historical period which has been relatively unexplored until now at Pompeii” said Osanna,...

Pompeii's burial not its first disaster Sid Perkins From Denver, at a meeting of the Geological Society of America Recent excavations reveal that the ancient city of Pompeii, famed for its burial by an eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, suffered through several devastating landslides in the centuries preceding its volcanic demise. About three-fourths of Pompeii has been excavated, says Jean-Daniel Stanley of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. However, most of the digs in the city have extended down only to the ground level of dwellings that were standing in the 1st century. In...

First Pompeii uncoveredSamnites founded city in Third Century BC (ANSA) - Rome, February 1 - The origins of the famed buried city of Pompeii have emerged from years of excavations, an international conference in Rome was told Thursday. The first Pompeii was not built by the Romans or even by the Greeks who preceded them, but by an ancient people called the Samnites, Pompeii heritage Superintendent Piero Guzzo told a packed audience of archaeologists and scholars. Wielding photos of inscriptions, votive offerings and even entire buildings, Guzzo said "a new season of studies has begun". "For the first time we...

Next week, the city will celebrate its official, 2,767th birthday. According to a tradition going back to classic times, the brothers Romulus and Remus founded the city on 21 April in the year 753BC. But on Sunday it was reported that evidence of infrastructure building had been found, dating from more than 100 years earlier. The daily Il Messagero quoted Patrizia Fortini, the archaeologist responsible for the Forum, as saying that a wall constructed well before the city's traditional founding date had been unearthed. The wall, made from blocks of volcanic tuff, appeared to have been built to channel water...