The History Blog

The official announcement is set for tomorrow, but it seems the campaign to raise money to buy the Victorian garden site on top of the only Roman circus in the UK has been successful. They had to raise £200,000 by the end of February in order to buy the property from developers, and as challenging a goal as it was in these tight times, they pulled it off.

Most of the money came in small donations from local people. They organised events including a chariot and two horses hurtling around the car park before Colchester United’s match against Oldham on February 20.

So creative. Good for them for rallying the local population to stand behind their unique heritage.

Now comes another major hurdle: raising £550,000 to purchase the Victorian barracks adjacent to the garden so they can build a visitor’s center next to the circus gates.

The campaigners are hoping some local organizations will step into the breach and scrape up this large sum, since the small donations are most likely tapped out.

Archaeologists excavating in the site of ancient Gabii south of Rome have uncovered the beginnings of lavish palace which probably belonged to the family of Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last Etruscan king of Rome.

So far just three rooms have been found, but they’ve already found terracotta roof tiles decorated with a minotaur, the emblem of the Tarquins, so they’re hoping they’ll find a lot more intact spaces as well as remains of the caved in parts.

“It’s an extraordinary find,” Rome Archaeological Superintendent Angelo Bottini said at the site….

“The way the site was demolished by furious locals in ancient times and later escaped local urban sprawl has allowed the palace to come to us virtually intact”. [...]

Aside from its historical value, the site is of “exceptional” archeological importance because similar buildings in Rome and other large cities were demolished to make way for later ones, Bottini observed. The 6th-century BC ruins, brought to light between September and December, in fact contain the highest intact walls of such a date ever found in Italy, at about two metres.

Under the well-preserved floor, archaeologists found 8 cells containing human remains, including 5 still-born infants. They weren’t human sacrifices, but rather buried during propitiatory rites before the building was built.

Tarquinius Superbus was considered a great tyrant by the Romans, who had become accustomed to being treated with respect according to pre-established social contracts by previous kings. The Tarquins were even related to the top families in Rome, including the Junii.

It was Lucius Junius Brutus who killed Tarquin after Tarquin’s son raped Lucretia, daughter of the prefect of Rome who was known for her virtue and who committed suicide after the rape by stabbing herself in the heart in front of her father.

He became the first co-consul of the Roman Republic. It was his descendant Marcus Junius Brutus who many centuries later on a certain Ides of March would plunge a dagger into another tyrant type fellow, one Gaius Julius Caesar.

Five years ago excavations in the UK city of Colchester uncovered what archaeologists at first thought was an oddly wide road, but then quickly realized was actually a 2nd century A.D. chariot racing circus. This was a major discovery. Not only is it the only Roman circus ever found in the UK, but it’s the only one north of the Alps.

Nothing remains above ground except stones taken for later building, but for almost 2,000 years the 350m outline has remained remarkably intact, under fields and 19th-century army land. The stable blocks that held up to 2,500 horses for a day’s racing may lie under derelict Victorian cavalry stables and barracks. [...]

Since then CAT has traced long stretches of the perimeter, which had banked seats holding up to 15,000 people. In the central reservation they found bases of start and finish posts, and water pipes proving the circus was grand enough to have the elaborate fountain lap markers shown in Roman mosaics.

They also found scraps of beautifully decorated carriage harness right up against the wall – evidence of an F1 style crash when a driver lost control of his team and spun off into the barrier.

The remains were reburied for their protection. Unfortunately, they are located underneath said Victorian army barracks, gardens and public roads, so unless the community can raise £200,000 ($312,000) by the end of February to buy the Victorian garden site from developers, the circus will remain underground and be built upon.

Then they have to come up with another £550,000 ($860,000) to buy the barracks building itself. They tried to get a million pound grant from Heritage Lottery Foundation, but despite the international importance and rarity of the site, the bid was refused. It was just too high a price, ultimately. The HLF could fund tons of smaller projects for that money.

If they are able to buy the site, the next step will be to build a vistor center on the grounds of the barracks, right next to the starting gates of the circus. The boundaries and divider of the track will then be built up into knolls so the entire area can be walked and people can get a sense of the size of the structure, which in its heyday accommodated 15,000 fans.

Go to the Save Colchester’s Roman Circus blog for more news about the fundraising appeal and to donate to the cause.

Italian police announced today that they’ve broken up a huge looting ring, recovering thousands of artifacts destined to be smuggled to countries including the United States.

During more than a year of investigations, authorities recovered nearly 1,700 statues, vases and other artifacts dating from pre-Roman times to the heyday of the empire. Police flagged 19 people for possible investigation by prosecutors.

The artifacts were mainly dug out from tombs near Naples and Venice and included a bronze bust of the emperor Augustus, customs police in Rome said.

Some pieces were already in the United States. Italian authorities worked with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Connecticut to repatriate 47 6th and 5th centuries B.C. statues that had been looted from a tomb in southern Italy.

This is the second time in two weeks that the ICE has returned artifacts from that period looted from southern Italy. Just last week they returned a Corinthian column krater from 580 to 570 B.C. that had been trafficked by Giacomo Medici (the now-convicted felon who directed the looting and sale of the Euprhonios krater) and wall panel fresco from Pompeii that had been stolen in 1997.

The Corinthian krater, incidentally, was recovered from Christie’s in June. It has first gone on the market at a Sotheby’s auction in 1985. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

The Great Drain is a water overflow system the Romans built to carry water a half a mile from the hot spring that feeds the Roman Bath in the city of Bath to the river Avon.

It has been working since then with few interruptions during periods of abandonment. It works so consistently and effectively it hasn’t even been fully explored despite being man-sized for much of the way.

Now thanks to a crappy extension built when the city expanded past the original walls long after the Romans left, engineers are going in for a full examination of the Great Drain and its various more modern attachments. The extension is backed up, leaving Bath in danger of flooding.

The Roman structure has easily outlasted the work of more modern engineers. A final section dating from the Sixties collapsed two years ago and had to be rebuilt.

Miles Barnes, of Bath council, said: “The Roman engineers really knew what they were doing. Most of the drain is in absolutely tip-top condition and still doing the job it was designed for.”

A large part of that is how simple the structure is. It doesn’t have any pumps or mechanisms or moving parts. It’s just solidly built tunnels and gravity that have allowed it to carry a million liters of hot water a day for 2000 years.

People are expecting to find more than great engineering down there.

When the site of the Roman Baths was originally excavated in the late 19th century, finds made in the Great Drain included 33 carved cameo gemstones and a mysterious tin mask.

Mr Barnes said: “Gems were as rare and precious then as they are now. We don’t know whether they were put in the sacred spring as an offering or just dropped by accident.”

The hot spring was sacred to the Celts, and the Romans sort of folded in the Celtic Sulis with their Minerva so there may be all kinds of votive offerings in the drain. There could also be all kinds of random stuff that fell down their over the millennia.

Even if they find no sparkly things, though, just getting a chance to fully explore the structure is a great thing. The original wooden planks that lined the drain are still there in many places. Plus, on a more practical city planning note, it’ll be helpful going forward to finally have a complete survey of the drain that keeps Bath from drowning itself.

Add another ancient structure to the long list of wonders uncovered during the prepatory excavations for the third subway line in Rome. This time it’s an amphitheater, possibly one built by Hadrian in the second century A.D.

As they dug through down through layers of modern, Renaissance and Medieval remains to the level of ancient Rome, they found what looked like a grand stairway made with sheets of granite and antique yellow marble. Across the way, the remains of a matching stairway — the steps long, shallow and deep — led archaeologists to the conclusion that they were looking at the seats of a covered rectangular amphitheater, a place where plays, speeches and debates were held by the city’s poets, scholars and politicians.

Archaeologist Roberto Egidi, who directed the excavation, said research in texts by ancient sources suggests they have found the Emperor Hadrian’s “Athenaeum” — an auditorium ancient writers say he built at his own expense on his return from Palestine around A.D. 135.

The new line, Metro C, will run fully 80 feet underground. It has to because Rome is such a huge pancake stack of history that they’d never be able to get a full subway line built any higher than that. You still have to have stations and air ducts and escalators and whatnot, though, and it’s a major challenge raising periscope through two and a half thousand years of habitation.

The amphitheater, in fact, was found in an area of Piazza Venezia that archaeologists thought (or hoped against hope, really) might be relatively “sterile” so a station could be built. Obviously that’s not on now and they’re going to have to build it a few yards away where there are just an ancient sewer system and some ancient shops.

Finds that in other cities would be hugely exciting, but in Rome, are the path of least of resistance. Ancient, medieval and Renaissance structures will be destroyed by this subway. There’s just no way around that. The historic center is so suffocated by traffic a third line is desperately needed.

Archaeologists are bummed, of course, but at the same time, this project has given them license to excavate areas they haven’t been able to sink their trowels into before. It has also given them funding, which is very hard to come by in this age of cutbacks.

This article has a great video of the Piazza Venezia dig.

The Antiquities Trade Gazette has an article on the Roman cameo glass vase that offers a few more details on its history. It’s all a little nebulous and should be taken with a grain of salt given the magazine’s pro-trade perspective, but I dutifully report nonetheless.

First of all, the primary source is Richard Falkiner, a coin expert, antiquities vetter and a correspondent for the Antiquities Trade Gazette. He’s also described in the article as an “antiquities consultant” to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and to Bonhams. He has had the opportunity to inspect the vase in person at Bonhams.

The vase is thought to have resided in a private European collection for some time. The collector is a long-term client of Bonhams.

Mr Falkiner, a long-standing vetter of antiquities at the Grosvenor House fair, told ATG: “As far as I can see, the repairs make it look as though it has been out of the ground since at least the 18th century, possibly the 16th.”

Bonhams say that, in co-operation with leading experts in the field and with the present owner of the vase, they will be carrying out detailed research over the coming months into the historical background of the vase and its miraculous survival, as well as into its more recent history and chain of ownership.

Okaaay… So in other words, they have nothing concrete at all. I sure would love to know who this long-term client of Bonhams is and why he hasn’t been able to provide a verifiable ownership history of the piece. At the very least he should know who he got it from, no? How about just the length of time he’s actually owned it? Instead all we get is “private collection” and “for some time.”

Now, Falkiner has extensive experience in vetting antiquities, for sure. He’s a bit of a jack of all trades, as many experts who work for auctioneers, dealers and collectors have to be. In fact, he spotted one of the Greenhalgh family’s cuneiform fakes at Bonhams in 2006 after the British Museum had given the blatant fraud its seal of approval.

He’s not exactly a disinterested observer either, though. He contracts for Bonhams, he’s a vocal defender of the antiquities trade, his expertise is general — primarily in numismatics — and he hasn’t done any scientific analysis of the vase, just sort of given it a once over.

To sum up, the circumstances remain shady. Your trusty neighborhood cynic will stay on the story.

Bonham’s has announced that they’ve received a uniquely complete and intricate Roman cameo glass vase.

Roman cameo glass is extremely rare — there are only 15 known pieces — and the previous top-of-the-line item was the beautiful Portland vase which is missing its base and has only 7 carved figures on the surface. This complete vase has 30 figures.

It dates from somewhere between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D., and stands a dramatic 13 inches (33.5 cm) high.

This type of vase is formed from two layers of cobalt blue glass with a layer of white on top which is cut down after cooling to create the cameo-style decoration.

A spokesman added: “Items of this kind were produced, it is thought, within a period of only two generations. [...]

The recently identified vase is also said to be more complex than others of its kind Bonhams experts believe that this magnificent artefact could rewrite the history books on cameo vases.

Unlike the Portland vase, it still has its base and lower register and will therefore add significantly to the archaeological understanding of these vessels.

It’s not for sale. Yet. The owner is a “private European collector” who is currently passing it around various museums and experts for further study.

Giant red flag right there. Something’s not kosher about this, most likely a little something called loot. A piece of this stature doesn’t come out of nowhere. If it had been in any known collections, even private ones, somebody would have documented it. For it to surface now with no history of ownership … Well, it doesn’t bode well.

It could be perfectly legitimate. It could have been kept a secret in some reclusive millionaire’s castle for hundreds of years. It’s just that those kinds of stories tend to spring from the pages of novels rather than newspapers.

For Bonham’s to have been allowed to publicize it suggests they’re priming the market for a major sale. In this day and age, the old “anonymous private collector” shtick might not fly, especially not with such an extraordinary piece.

A Roman era skeleton found in Gloucester in 1972 has mystified archaeologists for decades. It was found with a fancy silver belt and shoe fittings and an inlaid silver knife from somewhere in the Balkan/Southern Russia area, which is a long ways away for someone in 400 A.D. Britain.

They knew from his burial in a mausoleum and from his quality vestments that he was obviously someone important, but they didn’t know if he was a local man who could afford exotic gear or someone who came from the same place as the silver.

Now thanks to a research grant, the Gloucester City Museum has been able to analyze the skeleton with state of the art technology and the results are in: he was a Goth from east of the Danube, most likely a high ranking mercenary in the Roman army.

(Oh, and he was also a vegetarian. A lot of these Romanized tough guys seem to have subsisted primarily on a vegetarian diet.)

David Rice, archaeology curator at Gloucester City Museum, said: “Archaeologists have always wondered who he was and what he was doing in Gloucester.

“We’ve discovered he came from way outside of the Roman Empire, from the other side of the Danube.”

It was possible to detect he lived in very cold regions as a child, before moving west, he said.

Mr Rice added: “To have such an unusual person in this city means that Gloucester was a more important place in Roman times than we’ve previously thought.”

That means there were Romanized Goth functionaries in the far-flung areas of the Empire just 10 years before Alaric and his Visigoth army sacked Rome. Before then, they had been in a military covenant with the Byzantine Empire since the middle of the 4th c.

That relationship soured under the Emperor Valens. They defeated and killed him at Adrianople in 378 A.D.

Even Alaric had various deals with the Eastern and Western Empire at various times. The Roman Senate went so far as to grant him a generalship. Of course, it was only to stop him from besieging the city, and the deal fell through soon enough. Hence the sack.

Pardon my rambling. The point of all this blather is that Goths were involved in the Roman military, but they were also fighting against it for centuries. The fact that a high-ranking Goth would be deployed to Britannia province in 400 A.D. is very much unexpected.

Starting next week, Caravaggio’s painting the “Adoration of the Shepherds” is going to be restored in public in Rome’s Chamber of Deputies, the lower chamber of the Italian parliament (basically the Italian version of the House of Representatives).

Small groups of tourists and art students will be allowed to watch the restorers at work. The goal is to inspire a greater sense of connection and involvement with Italy’s rich artistic heritage.

The painting doesn’t seem to be in need a huge amount of work. The projected end of the restoration is February of next year, in time for the work to go on display in the Quirinale Palace on the 400th anniversary of Carvaggio’s death.

Caravaggio, whose real name was Michelangelo Merisi, was on the run from the law when he painted the “Adoration of the Shepherds”. He had a notoriously bad temper, which got him in many a brawl. He basically never lived in a city without getting chased out of it after he whupped the wrong guy. In 1606 he killed a man over a tennis match and had to flee Rome with a price on his head.

Over the next 3 years, he went from Naples to Malta (where he got into a brawl and ran) to Sicily (whence he fled because his enemies were trying to kill him) to Naples again (where 4 knights in armor attacked him and wounded him) to Porto Ercole, where he died, apparently from a fever, on his way way back to Rome to ask the Pope for a pardon.

That was in 1610, just 1 year after painting the “Adoration of the Shepherds” during his time in Messina, Sicily.

His chiaroscuro style — dark and light elements contrasting strongly with little or no mid-range — and embrace of naturalism influenced great artists who came after him like Rubens and Rembrandt.