Archaeologists with France’s National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) have excavated the remains of a Roman villa from the 2nd century in an ancient working class district of Nîmes, southern France.

Most of the rooms have concrete floors and painted plaster on the walls. The easternmost room of this domus has a polychrome mosaic floor with geometric decorations. Further south, this house is also equipped with a heated room and a well, probably located in an adjoining open space. However, these remains are less readable due to their deterioration.

The villa was found in an area that had been dedicated to viticulture since the 5th century B.C., but became urbanized after the Roman conquest and construction of the Via Domitia, the first Roman road in Gaul, in the 2nd century B.C.

The Via Domitia was built in 118 B.C. by senator Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus after his defeat of the Allobroges in southern Gaul. The road ran through 370 miles of southern France, connecting the Pyrenees to the Alps. It played a key role in the Romanization of the Mediterranean coast of France and in the development of urban centers.

For Nîmes, the Via Domitia became the nucleus of its development as an urban center. It entered the city by the Porta Augusta, the main gate in the Augustan city walls, and created a new peri-urban southern district characterized by craftsmen’s workshops including several forges. The villa occupies the northern half of that district.

This domus has elements in common with the one unearthed in 2021 in the central forum district of the ancient city. Both villas have walls frescoed in color blocks of red, white and black. Both have rooms with hypocaust heating. Both have concrete floor embellished with mosaics including a section of hexagonal tiles in black and white.

The domus discovered in 2021 is a block away from the exquisitely-preserved Maison Carrée, a temple dedicated to August’s grandsons Gaius and Lucius, which was of course a much more glamorous address than the southern intermural district. Its finishes are more luxurious, most notably the opus sectile carpet made of inlaid marble of many colors.

The newly-discovered villa does have a concrete floor that may once have had an opus sectile inlay of its own. You can see a circle containing holes that outline kite shapes. It looks to me like it was the underfloor of an opus sectile mosaic similar in design to the one in the House of the Faun in Pompeii. I’ve never seen the punctured outline like that before.

The villa was altered during its occupation. The possible hypocaust system was installed over the honeycomb mosaic floor, for example, but its lifetime was cut short.

The end of the occupation of this islet seems marked by a widespread fire. Collapses of burnt constructions were discovered all over the land, evidently in the south of the plot and also on the concrete floors of the domus . This fire made it possible to preserve the architecture of the ancient buildings, made up of 90% raw earth, in the form of bricks or solid earth (construction technique in rammed earth with compaction between two planks).

A previously unknown subterranean tract nearly half a mile long of an Augustan-era aqueduct has been rediscovered by spelunkers in Naples, southern Italy. Spelo-archaeologists from the non-profit Cocceius Association were able to investigate 647 meters (2123 feet) of a branch that tunnels through the Posillipo Hill.

The Aqua Augusta was unique in the Roman world because it supplied not just one main urban nucleus, but at least eight of them in the Bay of Naples area, including Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum and Cumae. It was built between 33 and 12 B.C by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, best friend and son-in-law of Augustus, when he held the high rank of curator aquarum, the magistrate in charge of the supply, management and maintenance of Rome’s aqueducts.

The source of the water was the town of Serino in the Campanian Apennines which was famed for the purity of its springs. The aqueduct was more than 90 miles long and consisted of 10 branches, seven leading to urban centers and three private offshoots carrying water to the villas of the wealthy. It would remain the longest Roman aqueduct for more than 400 years until construction of the 265 mile-long Aqueduct of Constantinople.

Most of the route was outdoors through channels and brick arches, but the mountainous terrain often required the creation of underground tunnels through a variety of rock types. Tunnels were dug directly into soft rock like tufa or limestone, but sandy soil required the construction of walls and barrel vaulting. The remains of a stretch of brick arches can be found in the Ponti Rossi area of Naples. The endpoint also still stands. The Piscina mirabilis, a massive barrel vaulted cistern built in the port city of Misenum to provision the naval fleet housed there with fresh water, is the largest ancient Roman cistern in the world.

Despite its significance as one of Rome’s greatest architectural achievements, the Aqua Augusta has been little explored and barely documented. The existence of an aqueduct length under Posillipo was noted in 1938 by doctor and archaeology enthusiast Italo Sgobbo, but he did not document it. There was no map or description of the location of the entrance or of the tunnels.

In 2021, Neapolitan native Giuseppe Scodes informed the Cocceius Association that he and his friends had played in those ancient channels as children 40 years ago. Last year the organization was able to secure the permits to access the potential site and Scodes led them to where he remembered the entrances once had been. They were completely covered, however, obscured and inaccessible thanks to forest growth in the decades since young Peppe had played in the coolest fort a kid could ask for.

After days of clearing the underbrush, they were able to reach the tufa wall and climb 13 feet up its vertical surface to get a look inside a hole. That was definitely an ancient access point to the aqueduct, but it was impracticable as an access point for a modern exploration team. They kept looking for an easier ingress, and luckily they found one 250 feet away. After that all they had to do was spelunk, and that’s the easy part. (To them.)

They found the aqueduct tunnels in excellent condition. The section they explored channeled water from the Crypta Neapolitana (originally a military communications tunnel) to Posillipo and the neighboring island of Nisida. It consists of one main specus (roofed channel) 28 inches wide at the roomiest part. A layer of hydraulic plaster 25 inches high was found at the base of the walls, and it is in turn coated in a thick layer of limestone deposited by centuries of flowing hard water. It is a winding, turning path, the result of errors and/or necessary derailments encountered by Agrippa’s builders.

There are some blockages and tight spots, but the full length is explorable. This is the first long uninterrupted stretch of a Roman aqueduct in outstanding condition that will be able to be studied in minute detail.

Rabun Taylor(opens in new tab), a professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the report, told Live Science in an email that the newly discovered aqueduct section is interesting because it is “actually a byway that served elite Roman villas, not a city. Multiple demands on this single water source stretched it very thin, requiring careful maintenance and strict rationing.”

Taylor, an expert on Roman aqueducts, also said the new find “may be able to tell us a lot about the local climate over hundreds of years when the water was flowing.” This insight is possible thanks to a thick deposit of lime, a calcium-rich mineral that “accumulates annually like tree rings and can be analyzed isotopically as a proxy for temperature and rainfall,” he explained.

Ferrari, Lamagna and other members of the Cocceius Association plan to analyze the construction of the aqueduct as well, to determine the methods used and the presence of water control structures. “We believe that there are ample prospects for defining a research and exploration plan for this important discovery, which adds a significant element to the knowledge of the ancient population” living in the Bay of Naples, they wrote in the report.

Votive deposits of bronze objects from the Iron Age have been discovered near the city of Chełmno in northern Poland. Dozens of bronze ornaments and numerous human bones were unearthed, the remains of sacrificial rituals that took place at the site about 2,500 years ago when the Lusatian culture inhabited the area. The important Lusatian fortified settlement of Biskupin lies just 60 miles southwest of the find site.

Today the area is farmland, but in the 6th century B.C. it was a lake. Leaving metal objects in bodies of water as offerings was a well-known practice in prehistoric Europe and more than 30% of the prehistoric artifacts found in Poland came from water sites. However this is the first lake site in Poland that contains both metal artifacts and human remains.

The lake eventually dried up into a peat bog whose anaerobic environment preserved the artifacts, bones and rare traces of organic materials like rope and textiles. The bog was drained to convert it into the farmland and agricultural work over the years has disrupted the archaeological material and when members of a metal detecting group who work with heritage authorities to survey potential sites of interests scanned the field on January 8th, they found a number of artifacts on the surface of the ground, churned up in recent plowing.

They alerted archaeologists from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń who excavated the site finding three distinct deposit groupings. Objects recovered include neck torcs, bangle bracelets, beads, spirals, large brooches with round spiral heads that look like novelty swirl lollipops, horse harness fittings and parts of a unique necklace decorated with fish tail pendants. Most of the objects are Lusatian in style, but there are a few pieces typical of the Scythian peoples in what is now Ukraine.

So far more than 100 fragments of human bone have been recovered. Lusatians cremated their dead and buried them in large urn cemeteries and these bones are unburned. That suggests they were deliberately sacrificed.

Researchers claim that human sacrifices may have been made due to population shifts and, by extension, invasions.

Dr. Gackowski explained that this happened due to the influx of nomadic peoples from the Pontic Steppe into the region, including the Scythians.

“These people, probably in order to ward off the violent changes associated with the arrival of new neighbours with a completely different organization, appearance and vision of the world, began to practice a variety of rituals,” he said.

The latest finds will now be sent to the University of Science and Technology in Kraków for examination and conservation.