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Live Science reports that archaeologists have uncovered a villa at the edge of the ancient city of Fregellae, which the Roman army razed in 125 B.C. A layer of fire damage shows that the villa's buildings and the surrounding crops were destroyed at the same time as the city. A Roman military camp protected by a fortified wall and a moat has also been found nearby. Founded as a Roman colony, Fregellae was home to many Samnites, a non-Roman people who had once been enemies of the Roman Republic. The city's residents are known to have rebelled against Rome, according...

A 2,300-year-old drainage system carved into bedrock beneath Pompeii will be used again to divert increasing rainwater into the sea.Mount Vesuvius on the west coast of Italy is the only active volcano in continental Europe and its eruption in the year AD 79 buried the city of Pompeii under thousands of tons of hot ashes and rocks. Seconds after the eruption the southern Italian town was engulfed in a 500°C "pyroclastic heat surge," when fast-moving currents of hot gases and volcanic matter (tephra) killed every one of the approximately 30,000 inhabitants, instantly.This 170-acre archaeological site is mostly preserved within ash,...

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...

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...

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...

Pompeii find shows secrets of the Samnites By Bruce Johnston in Rome (Filed: 05/07/2004) The discovery in Pompeii of a pre-Roman temple is being hailed as evidence that the city was sophisticated and thriving 300 years before Vesuvius erupted. The temple is said to be of Mephitis, a female deity worshipped by the Samnites, a mysterious ancient people who preceded the Romans in Pompeii. The temple complex includes a sanctuary where it is thought girls from good families worked briefly in "sacred prostitution" as a rite of passage to full womanhood. The Samnites were previously thought of as mountain warriors,...