Friday Archaeology Blogging
Grab bag o'Roman stuff edition.

A couple of recent developments in the world of Roman archaeology:

Roman settlement found next to 'devil's hill'
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

Evidence of a Roman sacred site has been discovered at the foot of a man-made hill created thousands of years before the Romans arrived in Britain, it was announced yesterday.

That would be Silbury Hill:


Click to see larger version

It's a massive construction, originally terraced, with a presumably ceremonial walkway to the top. It's surrounded by a sort of moat, bridged by two causeways (the material used to build the hill was originally dug out of the moat). It was probably built in about 2600 B.C., roughly contemporary with some of the early phases of Stonehenge. Various myths and legends have arisen about the hill; according to one tradition, it is the tomb of the legendary King Sil and his golden horse. Another tale, the source of the "Devil's Hill" moniker, relates that the devil was carrying a load of earth to drop on a nearby town. When he was stopped by some priests from Avebury, he dropped the dirt, creating Silbury Hill. Although various theories have been put forward (e.g. an enormous sundial), the truth is that we have no idea whatsoever what that hill was built for, or how it was used in neolithic times.

Returning to the Romans, it's not at all surprising that they would build a religious site there. Contrary to what one might expect, the Romans were extremely open-minded about other religions (they tended to outlaw religions only in cases where there were issues of pubic order), to the point where they made a practice of adopting the worship of "foreign" gods. A prime example of this is the Egyptian goddess Isis, whose cult became very popular in Roman Italy.


The Temple of Isis at Pompeii - click to enlarge

The main question, yet to be answered, about the Roman site at Silbury Hill is to which deity it was devoted. It remains distinctly possible that it was actually a Celtic deity whose worship was promoted at the site.

Anyway, moving along, awhile back I did a Friday Archaeology Blogging on the insignia of Maxentius. There have been further developments:

Scepter from Roman emperor exhibited
Telegraph, 27 February 2007

The scepter, which is topped by a blue orb that represents the earth, was discovered at the end of last year and is believed to have been held by Emperor Maxentius, who ruled for six years until 312AD.


This is the best picture of the scepter that I've been able to find so far.

Hopefully, we'll get a chance to see the rest of the insignia soon.

Friday Archaeology Blogging

Well, a couple of things this week. It seems the past month or so has produced a couple of finds that could be filed under the "famous lost sites" category. I'll deal with the most recent one first:

Ancient Welsh city found
14/8/2006

Caer Caradoc at Mynydd y Gaer, Glamorgan, is one of the most important locations in all of ancient British history. It is the fabled fortress city of King Caradoc 1, son of Arch, who fought the Romans from 42-51AD.

Caradoc had some success against the Romans, fighting a guerrilla campaign for a number of years before he was betrayed by the queen of a neighbouring tribe, and arrested. Unusually, his life was spared by the emperor Claudius, and by all accounts he lived out his life with his family in Italy. He is sadly overlooked as a historical figure, with most of the credit for opposing the Romans in Britain going to Boudicca, whose revolt happened more than a decade later.


Caradoc

I would point out here that so far, the site has only been identified from aerial photographs, so hopefully they're intending to get in there and dig. Apparently, they're basing the identification of the site as Caradoc's city on toponomy and ancient records, so excavation is going to be necessary to confirm it.

Moving along then, to another "famous" discovery:

Augustus' birthplace believed found
Posted 7/20/2006 5:51 PM ET

ROME (AP) — A team of archaeologists announced Wednesday they have uncovered part of what they believe is the birthplace of Rome's first emperor Augustus.


Augustus

This one's a bit more dubious. What they've found, in fact, is part of fairly elegant house on the Palatine Hill, in Rome. There is, so far, no evidence whatsoever that Augustus was actually born there; in fact, there is some debate over whether he was born in Rome at all (the other possibility is Velitrae). However, a house on the Palatine that survived the Great Fire of July 19, A.D. 64 and the subsequent rebuilding is in itself an interesting find, whether the future emperor was born there or not.

Lastly, in a bit of follow-up news, in an earlier "Friday Archaeology Blogging", I described the site of a purported pyramid in Bosnia as "unquestionably something, and a pretty damned impressive something at that." Not so, apparently:

Bosnia "Pyramid" Is Not Human-Made, U.K. Expert Says
Sean Markey
for National Geographic News

June 13, 2006
A war of words continues to rage over the alleged discovery of an ancient pyramid in Bosnia.

.
.
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Speaking at a press conference in Sarajevo, Anthony Harding [President of the European Association of Archaeologists] told reporters the pyramid-shaped hill was a natural phenomenon.

"My opinion and the opinion of my colleagues is what we saw was entirely geological in nature," the AFP news agency quoted him as saying.

So, basically, it's a hill, and I'm an idiot... :)

Friday Archaeology Blogging

Wow, this week just flew by! Anyhoo...

21 April 2006
EXCLUSIVE: WHO DVNNIT?
EXCLUSIVE Forty-nine skeletons, each with its head cut off, have been found in a Roman grave. It's a murder mystery that stretches back nearly 2,000 years and experts are trying to solve the crime and establish...
By Claire Donnelly

IT IS an 1,800-year-old murder mystery that has baffled Britain's finest historians.

More bloody and mysterious than an episode of Waking The Dead, this is a real-life detective story set in Roman Britain.

At its centre are the mutilated, decapitated skeletons of 49 huge men, tossed in a hillside grave after suffering horrible deaths.

Their heads were hacked off with such force, their necks were shorn clean through.

The battered remains all show the signs of the men's desperate attempts to defend themselves -collarbones, shoulder blades, a knee, and a jaw - all slashed to the bone in their struggle to survive.


A Roman building in York

The article goes on to speculate about the reason for the these mens' murders:

Beheading was used as a punishment in the Roman world -belief that the soul resided in the head made it particularly terrifying - but it was not usually used on worthy Romans like these legionaries.

One explanation was that the men were errant soldiers who faced a Roman court martial.

As Miranda Green, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Wales explains: "The only reason we can see for their beheading was if their crime had been a particularly terrible one -like cowardice."

This raises the spectre of one of the harshest forms of discipline used by the Roman army. Under this punishment, the soldiers of a disgraced legion (often one which had broken in battle) were assembled and divided into groups of ten. One man in each group, chosen by lot, was then killed by the other nine. The practice, known as "decimation" because of the one-in-ten factor, was carried out rarely, but is known to have been carried out on the Third Legion Augusta in A.D. 18., among others.
It is entirely possible that these bodies are the victims of a decimation.

Another theory - and one backed by historians - is that the troops were victims of the particularly vicious political purge that followed the Emperor's [Septimus Severus, in this case] death in 211AD.

When Severus died, it sparked a bloody war of succession between his sons, Caracalla and Geta.


Septimus Severus

Caracalla(left) and Geta(right)


This too is a plausible scenario, especially because the pottery evidence from the grave supports the date. Septimus Severus died at York, where the bodies were found, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the dead men were some of Severus' soldiers who found themselves on the wrong side of the feud between Caracalla and Geta (the feud was won in fairly short order by Caracalla).

However, I would like to propose a different possibility. Early in the reign of Septimus Severus, in the 190s A.D., a man named Clodius Albinus set himself up as a sort of "Emperor" in Britain and Gaul.


Silver coin of Clodius Albinus

He was eventually defeated by Septimus Severus, and is relatively unimportant in the context of Roman history. However, there is an interesting passage concerning him in the Historia Augusta, a moderately reliable fourth-century series of biographies. The author of Albinus' biography has the following to say about the man's personality:

"Toward his wife he was unbearable, toward his servants unjust, and in dealings with his soldiers brutal. For he would often crucify legionary centurions, even when the character of the offence did not demand it, and he certainly used to beat them with rods and never spared. From David Magie's translation of the Historia Augusta, "Clodius Albinus" XI.6, emphasis mine.

So, once again, there is the possibility that the men were killed under Clodius Albinus' harsh discipline. However, lacking further information about what, precisely, was found in the graves, it is very difficult to make a secure choice between the various possibilities.

Friday Archaeology Blogging

Well, more like Friday Ancient History Blogging this time around.



Publius Cornelius Tacitus is generally considered to have been among the very best of the ancient Roman historians. Born c. A.D. 56, he composed a number of historical works, including a biography of his father-in-law, the Roman general Gnaeus Julius Agricola. Agricola is primarily remembered for having carried out a successful series of campaigns in what is now Scotland, culminating in a decisive victory at the Battle of Mons Graupius, the actual location of which is unknown.


The Roman military bathhouse at Bearsden, Scotland, just to get some archaeological material in here!

Agricola carried out these campaigns during the reign of the Emperor Domitian, and this fact put Tacitus in a bit of a quandary, for he loathed and despised everything about that emperor. So how then was Tacitus to write the biography of a man he idolized, but who happened to be carrying out the policies of man he abhorred? Well, Tacitus took the tried-and-true path, and put his own feelings about Domitian, and about Roman imperialism in general, into the mouths of Rome's enemies. In particular, he "recorded" the speech of Calgacus, Chief of the Caledonii, to his warriors immediately before the climactic battle at Mons Graupius. In this fiery speech, Tacitus searingly criticizes Roman greed and imperialism through the mouth of the Celtic warlord. Particularly fierce is this portion:

"But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace."

On a related note, have I mentioned how irritated it makes me when people question whether there is anything still relevant in Classical literature?

Another Archaeology Blog

So over the past couple of weeks, a certain amount of our traffic has come from people who have been googling "Tudor-Whelan" and found a link to our, um, uncomplimentary remarks of February 10th (as a matter of fact, for a few glorious days, we were the first link one received when googling "Tudor-Whelan"). However, we are not the only people to have expressed annoyance with Tudor-Whelan Property Holdings; in fact, we're not even the only Canadians. And this has been a very long-winded and incoherent way of saying that we're adding Mirabilis.ca to the list of blogs we like.

And, um, speaking of Tudor-Whelan Property Holdings, it appears that they may be climbing down on the issue of selling the tombstone abroad.

Friday Archaeology Blogging: Regina and Barates

Let us commence with this:

Britain is likely to lose magnificent Roman tombstone
By Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

EXCITEMENT over a Roman gravestone discovered in the centre of Lancaster has been dampened by the news that, although the artefact is barely out of the ground, Britain is likely to lose it to an overseas buyer.

Archaeologists said yesterday that the gravestone, which depicts with great clarity a mounted trooper holding a sword and the head of a man he has just killed, was a unique find.

The stone has yet to be dried, conserved and studied, but its owner — the developer on whose land it has been found — has already sought valuation advice from Sotheby’s.

Christopher Tudor-Whelan, director of Tudor-Whelan Property Holdings, which specialises in commercial investment properties, hopes to sell it in New York. He confirmed yesterday that he has been told that he can expect to sell it for “up to $100,000” (£57,500).

Sounds to me like Christopher Tudor-Whelan, director of Tudor-Whelan Property Holdings which specialises in commercial investment properties, is deserving of a swift kick in the fork. But that's just me (and, for the sake of fairness, it's worth pointing out that there are artefacts in the British Museum whose provenance is, shall we say, somewhat odd).

The gravestone, which commemorates a cavalry officer of the late 1st century or early 2nd century AD, was unearthed when archaeologists excavated land in the city centre before construction work began on a block of flats. Experts are overwhelmed by the artefact’s quality, although it is in three pieces and yet to be reassembled.

The stone, which originally would have measured 2.5m (8ft) in height, features a solar face, reminiscent of the famous Medusa head from Roman Bath, above the trooper’s head. The beheaded victim kneels on the ground, holding his sword.

Eight feet?!?!???! That is one monster of a tombstone...

Although beheading war victims was accepted Roman practice, it is thought that no such depiction of a man on horseback has been found before.

Importantly, the stone also bears an inscription that provides clues to the man to whom it was dedicated — a citizen of a Celtic tribe in northern Europe, the Treveri, which is known to have occupied an area where Belgium, Germany and France meet. The tribe was said to have provided Julius Caesar with his best cavalry.

The inscription refers to a man called Lucius Nisus Vodvilleius, or Insus, son of Vodullus. The precise name is unclear as it is abbreviated.

Oh, Lucius Nisus Vodvilleius (or perhaps Insus, son of Vodullus), what sins did you commit in life, that your tombstone ended up on land belonging to Christopher Tudor-Whelan, director of Tudor-Whelan Property Holdings, which specialises in commercial investment properties?

Anyway, enough snark. I selected this particular article for this week's FAB mostly because my very favourite archaeological find in the entire world ever is a Roman tombstone from Britain, dating probably to the 3rd century A.D. And, here it is:



The inscription on the bottom reads:

D M REGINA LIBERTA ET CONIVGE BARATES PALMYRENVS NATIONE CATVALLAVNA AN XXX

"To the spirits of the departed and Regina, freedwoman and wife of Barates of Palmyra, a Catuvellaunian by race, thirty years old."

Alright, so we have this Barates, from Palmyra in the Middle East. As a young man, 17 or 18 years old, he enlists in the Roman army, and gets posted to Britannia, which is as far away from, and unlike, Syria as it is possible to get in the Roman Empire. Britain in the 3rd century was not as awful as it had been, say, 200 years earlier, but it was still cold, wet, and dangerous (In fact, the emperor Septimus Severus died in Britain while conducting military operations in A.D. 211). We can only imagine what it must have been like for a Syrian teenager.

However, our man Barates did alright. At some point, at one of the slave auctions, he encountered Regina, a Celtic woman from the tribe that had been in the vanguard of the opposition to Rome so many years before. Apparently a man of taste and discernment, Barates bought Regina. And then he did an unlikely thing; he not only freed her, but married her as well. This he did not have to do; had he merely wanted somebody to boink, he could have kept her as a slave. In fact, his act of marrying her was probably illegal, given that he was likely a soldier. Evidently, he fell in love with her, enough so that when she died, he paid for an ornate tombstone, and added a poignant little lament in his native language (Aremaic) beneath the traditional Latin inscription.

Barates never went back to Syria. He died in the North of what is now England at the age of 63, according to his tombstone, which was found some distance, but not too far, from that of his young wife.

Anyway, I've obviously taken a few liberties with the evidence here in constructing the tale of Barates and Regina, but the core facts of the story (including Barates' affection for Regina) are likely enough. Which is why, when I read shit like this:

Asked how he had felt when [the tombstone of Lucius Nisus Vodvilleius] was unearthed, [Christopher Tudor-Whelan, director of Tudor-Whelan Property Holdings, which specialises in commercial investment properties] said: “The archaeological guys were more excited than me. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this will hold up the development’. At the end, the proof of the pudding is how much it is worth.”

my foot starts twitching...

For anybody interested in looking at the tombstones of Regina and Barates in more detail, they are published in Collingwood & Wright, The Roman Inscriptions of Britain: Volume I (Oxford U. Press, 1965), and are reference numbers 1065 and 1171 respectively.