Field Notes
They Turn Up in the Oddest Places
It’s not often that curators discover ancient ruins beneath their museums.
In 1967 archaeologists in the northern Italian city of Brescia sank an exploratory trench in a large courtyard of the Santa Giulia Museum, which is housed in a former Benedictine monastery dating from the eighth century A.D. Digging in the monks’ old vegetable garden, the excavators found two ancient Roman houses built between the first century B.C. and 400 A.D.
Archaeologists restored one of the houses, the Domus di Dionisio (House of Dionysus), between 1967 and 1971. Further excavation was delayed until 1998, when the museum launched a $3.5-million remodeling project, and work was resumed on the ancient structures. The team then conserved the second house, called the Domus delle Fontane (House of the Fountain). Recently, a third house has been unearthed, and more are known to exist.
“Most archaeological sites have to build a museum near the ruins. We had the museum and found the ruins,” remarked Angelo Maria Ardovino, the superintendent for the archaeological heritage of Lombardy.
Brescia, 60 miles east of Milan, was known to the ancient Romans as Brixia. In 89 B.C. Brixia became a Roman colony and over the next century grew in importance as a trading and manufacturing center. Vestiges of this Roman heritage—including a large theater, part of a temple and portions of the city’s original forum (including the Capitolium, a largely intact city hall)—can still be seen in modern Brescia’s city center.
The houses beneath the Santa Giulia Museum complex were located in a residential neighborhood that stretched from Brixia’s old forum to the city’s walls. The handsome geometric mosaic floors of the Domus delle Fontane and the finely painted frescoes of the Domus di Dionisio indicate that these city dwellers were comfortably middle-class.
Visitors can enter the excavation area from the museum and view the ongoing conservation work.
Enameled Pan
Staffordshire, England
Bronze
2nd century A.D.
Last June an amateur excavator wielding a metal detector discovered this second-century A.D. Roman bronze patera, or handled pan, in the moorlands of Staffordshire, England.
Although the vessel’s vivid, inlaid enamelwork beguiled British archaeologists, it was the engraved inscription under the rim that got them really excited: An unbroken sequence of letters lists four Roman forts—Mais, Coggabata, Uxelodunum and Cammoglanna—that were located at the western end of Hadrian’s Wall (see “Letters from the Frontier” in this issue), an 80-mile-long barrier built along the border of present-day England and Scotland by the Roman emperor Hadrian (117–138 A.D.)
The name of a person, “Aelius Draco,” and another place name, “Rigorevali,” are also incorporated in the cup’s design. Archaeologists have suggested that Draco may have been a former Roman soldier stationed near Hadrian’s Wall who later commissioned the patera (now missing its base and handle) as a souvenir of his time in the army. (The patera is featured in the British Museum’s current exhibit, “Buried Treasure: Finding our Past,” which runs until March 14, 2004.)
Halitosis?
The ancient Egyptians liked fresh breath and sparkling clean teeth. So they chewed natron (a natural form of baking soda), rinsed their mouths with a mouthwash made up of cumin, honey, frankincense, goose fat and water, and brushed their teeth with a toothpaste made from rock salt, pepper and dried iris flowers.
Why are a pair of eagle-headed Assyrian dieties standing guard over a Victoria’s Secret store in Hollywood, California? The store is located in the Hollywood & Highland Entertainment Complex’s “Babylon Courtyard,” its decor inspired by D.W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance. The “Fall of Babylon” segment of the movie featured the most ambitious film set of its time, with 5,000 extras, 250 chariots and carvings evoking the splendor of Mesopotamia.
The movie’s set designers certainly had some familiarity with the winged deities that once decorated the walls of the palace of Assyrian king Assurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.) at Kalhu (in northern Iraq). Like his modern counterpart, the ninth-century B.C. limestone figure—shown above and now on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts—holds a bucket in one hand and a spathe (a leaflike sheath supporting the flowers of the date palm tree) in the other.
Construction cranes dot the abandoned runways of Athens’s old international airport in Hellenikon, where basketball, baseball, softball and field hockey venues are being constructed for the 2004 Summer Olympic Games. While excavating a section of the airport, workers uncovered a cemetery that was in use from the seventh to the fourth century B.C. Archaeologists found 2,300-year-old marble relief sculptures that once adorned a family grave, as well as hundreds of ceramic vases and three bronze vessels. The old airport grounds have also yielded less hoary finds: unexploded bombs from the Second World War.
Every two years, the World Monuments Fund (www.wmf.org) lists the world’s 100 most-endangered cultural sites. The following ancient sites—from the territory covered in Archaeology Odyssey and included on the 2004 list—are in need of immediate protection.
Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III (Luxor, Egypt): 14th-century B.C. sanctuary, includes Colossi of Memnon
Khasekhemwy’s Fort (Hierakonpolis, Egypt): 3rd-millennium B.C. predynastic ceremonial enclosure
Tell Balatah (Nablus, West Bank, Palestinian Territories): biblical city of Shechem (1900–100 B.C.)
Apollonia-Arsuf (Herzilya, Israel): 6th-century B.C. Persian settlement, and Roman villa and Crusader castle
Iskaudarouna-Naqoura (Oumm el’ Amed, Naqoura, Lebanon): 7th-century B.C. Phoenician settlement, and 5th-century A.D. Byzantine settlement
Ain Ghazal (Amman, Jordan): 9,000-year-old Neolithic farming settlement
Amrit Religious Center (Amrit, Syria): 2nd-millennium B.C. religious center with Phoenician temple
Bosra City (Bosra, Syria): 1st-century A.D. Nabatean capital
Erbil Citadel (Erbil, Iraq): Site continuously inhabited for 8,000 years
Nineveh and Nimrud Palaces (Mosul, Iraq): Palaces of Assyrian kings Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.) and Assurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.)
Ghazni Minarets (Ghazni, Afghanistan): 11th-century A.D. mudbrick towers with Koranic inscriptions
Old Nisa (Bagir, Turkmenistan): Parthian city and palace (300 B.C.-300 A.D.)
Panticapaeum (Kerch, Crimea, Ukraine): Settlement dating to 2600 B.C., occupied by Greeks, Scythians and Samartians
Temple of Augustus (Ankara, Turkey): Temple built in 25 B.C. to honor the Roman emperor
Ephesus (Selçuk, Turkey): Hellenistic metropolis, home to the Library of Celsus and Temple of Artemis
Little Hagia Sophia Mosque (Istanbul, Turkey): 6th-century A.D. church, converted to a mosque in 1504
Palaikastro (Crete, Greece): 2nd-millennium B.C. Minoan city preserved under 2,000 years of coastal sediment
Helike (Achaia, Greece): Greek city destroyed in 373 B.C.
Port of Trajan (Fiumicino, Italy): Largest Roman port in the Mediterranean, remains of 2nd-century A.D. imperial palace
Tuff-Towns and Vie Cave (Pitigliano, Sorano and Manciano, in central Italy): Etruscan hilltop towns
Pazo de San Miguel das Peñas (Monterroso, Spain): 7th-century A.D. Swabian and Visigothic villa
Rabaçal Roman Villa (Rabaçal, Portugal): 1st-century A.D. Roman villa with mosaics
Notes from Malta
Some corpulent “mother goddess” statuettes discovered on the Mediterranean Maltese islands may not be mothers after all. (They lack breasts.) And the shape of Malta’s prehistoric temples, once thought to have mimicked the curves of the goddess’s ample buttocks and bosom, may instead have been derived from the natural contours of the islands’ limestone caves.
Last September, archaeologists, journalists and filmmakers from around the world gathered in Valletta, Malta, to discuss these and other questions. The four-day conference was organized by the Old Temples Society Foundation, a Florida-based nonprofit group dedicated to the preservation of Malta’s unusual megaliths.
The Maltese islands, 60 miles off the southwest coast of Sicily, are home to about two dozen of the oldest freestanding stone buildings on earth. The Ggantija temple complex on the island of Gozo is nearly 6,000 years old—more than 1,000 years older than Stonehenge and the Giza pyramids.
In an opening address, Maltese President Guido de Marco emphasized the necessity of preserving Malta’s prehistoric structures. Other speakers commented on the continuing hostility of the Maltese hunting lobby—hunters have used the temples as bird blinds in the past—and a controversial governmental proposal to dump domestic and organic waste in two quarries located about 2,000 feet away from the Mnajdra and Hagar Qim Neolithic temples.
Just three years ago, vandals toppled and defaced more than 60 stones at Mnajdra, leading the World Monuments Fund to include Mnajdra on its 2002 list of the world’s 100 most endangered sites.
Other speakers discussed Mnajdra’s astronomical significance. The temple’s main portal appears to be aligned with the first rays of light during the autumnal and vernal equinoxes. A case was made for additional stellar and solstitial sight lines within the temple, although the evidence for these is less compelling.
Malta’s mysterious “cart ruts” also came under scrutiny. Cart ruts—parallel lines cut into many of the island’s rocky ridges—have traditionally been assumed to be tracks left by primitive slide-carts, before the invention of the wheel. However, Claudia Sagona, a presenter from the University of Melbourne, proposed that the ruts may have been created by Neolithic farmers who sought to expand the amount of arable land on their barren island. She noted, as an example, that farmers on the rocky Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, created arable soil by cutting ruts in stony slopes and packing the ruts with a fill of silt and seaweed. As they tilled the soil year after year, adding more and more fill, the ruts became deeper and the soil became richer. A similar scenario may have occurred on Malta.
Cambridge University archaeologist John Robb noted that since the prehistoric Maltese remained in constant contact with Sicily and other Mediterranean locations, their unusual temple architecture, statuary and pottery were not the result of cultural isolation. Instead, as he put it, “In the quest for cultural identity, the Maltese didn’t inhabit an island; they created one.”—N.B.L.