I just finished reading the latest issue of Les Aigles de Rome (The Eagles of Rome) a comic by the splendid Swiss artist Enrico Marini that tells the story of Arminius. Ring a bell? He was the German chieftain who defeated the Roman forces led by Quintilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest. “Defeated” is an […]
Roman Empire
Posted inArchaeology
Tooth Analysis Reveals Sarmatian Child Traveled Thousands of Miles to Britain in Roman Times
In 2017, archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) were excavating land near the village of Offord Cluny in Cambridgeshire, England. Among the 42 burials they uncovered was one that would reveal an intriguing story. MOLA studied the remains along with researchers from the Francis Crick Institute and Durham University Archaeology Department. Their analyses […]
Posted inAncient Rome, Art
The Aldobrandini Wedding, the Most Famous and Admired Roman Fresco until Pompeii was Discovered
Since the Renaissance, the search for ancient remains, statues, marbles, and any object that could be sold to collectors in Rome was the order of the day. By the early 17th century, it had become a business with almost professional seekers, and as the painter and architect Federico Zuccari wrote, it was they who, in […]
Posted inClassical Archaeology
Ancient Lost City that withstood the Decline of the Roman Empire discovered in Italy
For centuries, the town of Interamna Lirenas in central Italy was thought to be an unremarkable backwater that declined after the fall of the Roman Empire. However, recent archaeological excavations by a team from the University of Cambridge have uncovered startling new evidence that challenges our understanding of life in Roman Italy. What was once […]
Posted inClassical Archaeology
A Domus decorated with a stunning Mosaic of Shells, Glass and Marble, uncovered between the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill
The Archaeological Park of the Colosseum, as part of a study and research project, has brought to light some rooms of a luxurious domus from the late Republican period. In 2018, some mural structures were excavated, and it once stood exactly where the Horrea Agrippiana were built during the time of Augustus. These were the […]
Posted inClassical Archaeology
A prison-bakery where slaves and blindfolded donkeys were used to grind the grain, unearthed in Pompeii
It was a narrow room with no exterior views, featuring small windows with iron bars for light. Notches on the floor coordinated the movement of the animals, forced to walk for hours with blindfolds. The facility was unearthed in Regio IX, insula 10, as part of ongoing excavations in a broader project to secure and […]
Posted inMedieval Archaeology
Analysis reveals Slavs began arriving on a large scale in the Balkans after the fall of the Western Roman Empire
A study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), in collaboration with Harvard University and involving the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), the University of Western Ontario, and the University of La Rioja (UR), reconstructs for the first […]
Posted inAncient Rome
Trajan’s Market, the “world’s oldest shopping mall”, which probably wasn’t a market at all
Considered as the first shopping mall in history, Trajan’s Market is a huge semicircular mass of brick, part of which remains buried under modern buildings and paradoxically may have had very little to do with commerce, according to the opinion of many historians who consider it more of an administrative center built in support of […]
Posted inAncient Rome
Anicia Faltonia Proba, the woman who opened the doors of Rome to the Visigoths in the year 410
During the Dominate era, in the Late Roman Empire, there lived a woman who has gone down in history for having been the one to open the doors of Rome to Alaric’s Visigoths in the year 410 AD. We are referring to Anicia Faltonia Proba, famous not only for her great culture but also for […]
Posted inAntiquity
How did Lock & Keys Work in Antiquity? (Video)
Keys and locks are objects we use every day to keep our homes and belongings secure. Did you know they’ve been in use for over 6,000 years? Archaeologists have found one of the first locks in the ruins of Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian empire. It was a wooden lock with a small […]