In this guest post, we introduce a few Google tools for helping your students see sites in situ. This will be the first of several posts on using digital tools in the classroom, and we’re really excited about the topic; we hope you are, too! Continue reading
In the final installment on the Perseus Project, I will cover the last two important features of the site: the Art and Archaeology Artifact Browser and the Vocabulary Tool. The image database is a collection of artifacts including Buildings, Coins, Gemstones, Sculpture, Sites, and Vases. The vocabulary tools lets you find the most often occurring words in any given text, which can helpful for both word studies and for learning new vocabulary. In case you missed the earlier posts, here are the links to Part 1 (introduction), Part 2: Words Words Words, and Part 3: Parsing and Other Crimes.
Archaeologists have discovered a new 6th century house near the Quirinal, according to several news reports. Sixth century BCE, that is, which is pretty impressive — that makes this house, which is well-preserved, the standing equivalent of the post-holes on the Palatine (the ‘huts of Romulus’).
Romulean huts.
The new house seems to be on the same plan, but is considerably more impressive-looking:
Archaeologists previously thought that this area was a necropolis.
The house was found within the circuit of the Servian walls. The lead excavator, Mirella Serlorenzi, thinks that this means the walls encircled the inhabited 6th-century city. Others had previously argued that the walls actually circled individual hills (behind paywall, sorry; discussion here, in Italian; full, but outdated, description of the walls in English). Excavations are ongoing, so the matter isn’t quite closed yet (and may not be fully determined). Ancient sources suggest that the 6th century walls did encircle the city, but that conflicts with the evidence for the Gallic sack of 390 BCE (which some have argued didn’t happen quite as the Romans claimed it did — see around p. 318).
Map of Rome, including hills and Servian wall (agger).
Aside from trying to figure out what the house was used for and who lived there (priest?), this discovery may also give archaeologists incentive to search near other parts of the Servian walls — and may increase some of scholars’ trust in Roman accounts of Servius Tullius, whose life story is in many ways unbelievable.
Rome in the news: This Old House by https://libraryofantiquity.wordpress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The BBC put out an hour-long documentary on Rome earlier this month. That in itself isn’t surprising (Rome is perennially fascinating) — but the underground laser scanning is pretty cool.
Technically, this program is only available in the UK. The website has some nice video clips. The academic advisor posted a blog post with some amazing pictures. And of course, if you google it. it has been illegally uploaded to YouTube (I’m not posting the link in case it gets taken down).
I’ll be watching it tonight and will update the post if I find out anything else interesting. Otherwise, we’d love to hear from anyone who’s already seen it!
Quick takes: Rome Underground! by https://libraryofantiquity.wordpress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
I find Diane Favro’s work really interesting. Her reconstruction of the Roman Forum as it changed from the Republic to Late Antiquity has made an appearance in my classes and in conference presentations, and certainly has sparked a lot of thought. So I was really excited to see her new work show up in my Twitter feed.
This new project is a reconstruction of Rome (the whole city) from Caesar’s death to Augustus’ death, with an emphasis on testing Suetonius’ report (Aug. 29) that Augustus claimed to have found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble. Favro’s research suggests that actually, based on the buildings we know Augustus reconstructed, this simply wasn’t the case. Continue reading
The Library of Antiquity 