Update on Volterra’s surprise amphitheater

Ancient

In 2015, a waterway restoration project in Tuscany’s ancient Etruscan city of Volterra stumbled on a Roman amphitheater whose existence was completely unknown. Test trenches found curved walls that indicate the full building was around 260 feet long and 200 feet wide and could seat an estimated 8,000-10,000 spectators, yet there are no surviving ancient sources that mention it and no traces of it above ground. It was completely buried and completely forgotten, earning it the title “the Amphitheater That Wasn’t There.”

The amphitheater was built in the Julio-Claudian era (likely the 1st century A.D.). Nobody knows exactly how long it was in use for performances and gladiatorial games, but there is evidence (the remains of meals, hearths, coins) of it having been reused as a private dwelling in the Middle Ages. Once it was abandoned and all maintenance ceased, the burial appears to have happened quickly. The amphitheater occupied a valley that silted up rapidly, raising the ground level. The site was then used for cultivation.

Since the discovery, the archaeological team has carried out seven excavation campaigns lasting two or three months apiece. Scraping up the money to excavate the surprise find has been challenging, with new funding for the next dig needing to be secured after each campaign. The first big chunk of change was 250,000 euros for the 2019 campaign financed by a bank. The region of Tuscany chipped in another 250,000 euros for 2020 and 2021, and Italy’s Ministry of Culture pitched in an additional 250,000 in 2021.

It was money very well spent. In 2020, the excavation campaign uncovered a system of underground vaulted passageways used by spectators to reach the bleachers. The same campaign found a vaulted corridor circumnavigating the arena, known as the “cuniculo circumpodiale,” that was used by the gladiators, wild beasts and performers to enter the arena at various locations. The walls and corridors are in exceptional condition.

In 2022, a major infusion of 4.5 million euros from the Ministry of Culture ensured that the excavation would have sufficient funds to see the job through to the end. Digging was suspended last spring and summer while bureaucratic issues were resolved but it has now resumed and will continue uninterrupted for two years until the entire amphitheater is uncovered, the site cleared and the structures secured. The excavation has to proceed one section at a time in a clockwise direction to ensure access routes between the sectors aren’t blocked off by the digging itself.

Follow the progress of this ground-breaking excavation on the Facebook page of “The Amphitheater That Wasn’t There.”

Roman bronze vessel hoard studied for the first time

Ancient

Newcastle University archaeologists have completed the first comprehensive study of the largest Roman bronze vessel hoard ever found in Britain, 160 years after it was discovered. The circumstances of its discovery were never documented and most of the hoard was tragically melted down by accident shortly after the find, so there are many unanswered questions about this exceptional grouping of late-Roman metalware.

As the story goes, enough copper-alloy vessels and iron tools to fill a “large sack” were found near Knaresborough in North Yorkshire sometime around 1860. The objects were sent to the iron foundry of one Thomas Gott in Knaresborough where the foreman mistook them for scrap metal and melted most of them down. In 1864, Gott donated eight vessels and fragments from two more to what would become the Yorkshire Museum. This first round of donations included a large fluted bowl almost 19 inches in diameter, three of four smaller bronze bowls of the Irchester form, a round dish and pieces of two strainers with handles. He donated the rest of the surviving hoard to the museum in 1876, the year before he died.

Today there are 31 surviving vessels, tools and fragments from the hoard in the permanent collection of the Yorkshire Museum. The lost pieces include several more 9-inch plates, several ovoid flat plates with handles with ornamented rims, fragments of other basins and plates, several bridle bits, a large number of iron nails and tools, among them what appeared to be a fire grate with four crossbars.

Gott kept whatever information he knew about the find site and discovery to himself. The research team did find a clue in his correspondence: that they had been found during the digging of a drain two miles north of Knaresborough. That makes the village of Farnham the likely spot, and real estate notices in the local paper at that time point to drainage work taking place in the marshy land of Low Hall just north of Farnham. Low Hall’s land manager, Frederick Hartley, was pals with Gott and they served together on the Knaresborough Improvements Commission. Hartley’s crew probably found the hoard in the marshy land of the Vale of Mowbray and he sent it to Gott, either as a favor or to make a few bucks on the side.

During the Roman period, two important Roman roads ran through the Vale: Cade’s Road, which ran north-south on the eastern side, and Dere Street to the west, which was a significant route providing a connection to York and Hadrian’s Wall. Because of these connections, there were a number of wealthy Roman villas in the area and it is thought that the items in the collection may have come from one of these, or an affluent townhouse or settlement close by.

The Knaresborough Hoard is the only known example of a late Roman hoard of this type to be recovered from a bog or marsh in Britain.

The large fluted bowl is a unique find in the British Isles. Basins of this form and size are usually made of gold and silver. This is the first bronze one found in Britain. It also had a rest that it sat on for dinner service. This stand is also the only example of its kind discovered in Britain.

The research team say that many of the items were clearly meant to impress guests at the table when displaying or serving food as when polished, the bronze would have resembled gold and would have suggested a certain level of wealth.

By carrying out a portable X-ray fluorescence analysis the team were able to confirm the composition of ancient alloys and discovered that many of the items in the collection also showed signs of ancient repairs, reinforcing the fact they were made from a valuable material.

The study has been published in The Antiquaries Journal. The final publication is only available via institutional login or for purchase, alas, but the accepted version can be read in its entirety here (pdf).

Monumental marble map of Rome on display again after 100 years

Ancient, Museums

The surviving fragments of the Forma Urbis, the monumental marble map of the city of Rome created between 203 and 211 A.D., have gone on display in a new dedicated museum on the Caelian Hill. The new Museum of Forma Urbis embeds the fragments under the floor of a main hall, superimposed onto Giovanni Battista Nolli’s 1748 Pianta Grande di Roma, an iconographic plan of Rome that lays out the city in a detailed floor plan much like the Forma Urbis did for the 3rd century city.

I mentioned the Forma Urbis just last month in connection with the excavation of the Templum Pacis where it was installed on the interior wall of a classroom. The map captured the city to a scale of 1:240, engraving a meticulously detailed floorplan of the city practically room-by-room on 150 marble slabs that had already been affixed to the wall with iron pins. It was damaged and looted for its marble over the centuries. What was left of it was rediscovered in 1562 and the fragments were kept in the Palazzo Farnese until 1741, but they weren’t exactly responsible stewards. Many plates were broken and used as construction material for the Farnese Gardens.

In 1742 the remnants became part of the collections of the Capitoline Museum. Today only 1,186 pieces of it (10-15% of the original) survive from unidentifiable slivers to slabs covering whole blocks. The Temple of Peace was incorporated into the church of SS Cosmas and Damian in the Roman Forum, and the ancient classroom wall is now the façade of the basilica. The traces left on the wall — the holes where the pins were inserted, wear outlines of the slabs — have helped archaeologists puzzle together the fragments. Around 200 of them have been identified and placed on the modern topography of the city mapped by Nolli.

The Museum of Forma Urbis is located inside the new Archaeological Park of the Caelian, a green space on the hill overlooking the Colosseum where a multitude of archeological, architectural and epigraphic remains are now on display. They were unearthed during the excavations of the late 19th century when Rome underwent a burst of construction as the capital of a unified Italy. The Municipal Antiquarium was built on the Caelian in 1884 to store the profusion of archaeological materials found in the excavations. It opened as a museum from 1929 to 1939 but had to close due to structural problems caused by construction of the subway.

The new park brings these objects back to light organized in thematic groups that will allow visitors to explore aspects of Roman society, how social status was expressed in funerary monuments, the contrast between modest sacred spaces (shrines, sanctuaries) and the largest temples of the Imperial era, the differences between public and private buildings, the evolution of architectural taste and marble processing techniques, and how artifacts were reused and reworked.

The Park and Museum open to the public today, January 12th. The Archaeological Park is open daily and is free of charge. The Museum does have a separate entrance fee (9 euros for non-residents), unless you get the MIC card, which if you’re going to Rome you most certainly should get because it’s just 5 euros and gets you free entrance to a ton of museums and sites for a whole year.

Double burial of Anglo-Saxon teen girl and child found

Medieval

Archaeological contractors excavating a site along a planned cable route in Lincolnshire have discovered a 1,300-year-old grave containing the remains of a teenage girl and a child. The two had been placed on their sides with the child as the big spoon behind the teenager. They were buried with valuable jewelry: two gold pendants with cabochon garnets, a silver pendant with an amber mount, two small donut-shaped translucent turquoise glass beads and an annular brooch.

The excavation unearthed the burials of more than 20 individuals inside a Bronze Age ring ditch, suggesting the site held funerary significance for centuries before it was used as a cemetery in the Anglo-Saxon period. More than 250 grave goods — knives, jewelry, pottery — were discovered in these burials, all of them dating to the 6th and 7th centuries.

Jacqueline McKinley, Principal Osteoarchaeologist, Wessex Archaeology, said: “Although many Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are known in Lincolnshire, most were excavated decades ago when the focus was on the grave goods, not the people buried there. Excitingly, here we can employ various scientific advancements, including isotopic and DNA analyses. This will give us a far better understanding of the population, from their mobility to their genetic background and even their diet.”

The relationship between the child and the teenager is not yet known but research and analysis are ongoing and will include isotope and Ancient DNA analysis of these and other skeletal remains. This will help to identify familial relationships and broader genetic links both within this community and between others in the region, and the movement of people in wider society.

Medieval wall paintings discovered during roof work at Cambridge University

Medieval

Builders restoring the roof of a 16th century building at Christ’s College, Cambridge University, have discovered three wall paintings hidden behind a wooden roof joist. The wall paintings depict a crowned portcullis, a crowned red Lancaster rose and a third motif that is partially obscured but is likely a fleur-de-lis. These motifs are all elements of the family crest of the foundress of Christ’s College, Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII.

The paintings were found in First Court, the oldest part of Christ’s College dating to the 15th century, in the roof over the northwest wall of the original library. They extend over 20 feet and were painted directly onto the plaster. Limewash was applied around the artworks to make them stand out.

Originally founded as God’s House, a school for grammar teachers, in 1437, it was enlarged and refounded as Christ’s College by Margaret Beaufort in 1505. She financed the transformation of a modest school into a fully-fledged college of Cambridge University, donated 39 books to form the kernel of its prestigious library, endowed it with two estates complete with their manors and spent £1625 on construction for the college between 1505 and 1509. She bequeathed even more of her properties to Christ’s College in her will, guaranteeing that it would have the steady income needed to thrive as an educational institution for centuries after her death.

Lady Margaret’s legacy is embedded in the architecture of Christ’s College. The family coat of arms, the portcullis of the Beaufort family, the red rose, the badge adopted by Henry VII as the first Tudor king, the white Marguerite (daisy) that was Lady Margaret’s personal emblem and the family motto “Souvent me souvient” (“I often remember”) are found on walls, over doorways and in monumental format over The Great Gate, the entrance into Christ’s College that still boasts its original 1509 oak door.

Cambridge University art historian Dr Christina Faraday said: “This is a really exciting and unusual discovery.” […]

Dr Faraday, who specialises in Tudor visual and material culture, said the works revealed “the ways that the college celebrated and advertised its royal patron during the early years of the 16th Century, following its re-founding”.

“A powerful and pious woman, with a keen interest in scholarship, Lady Margaret left her indelible mark on the college,” Dr Faraday said.

“The wall paintings are an early example of her family’s savvy use of visual ‘branding’ even beyond the royal court. Henry VII had a very weak claim to the throne, but became adept at using visual symbols like this to promote his kingship.”

It’s rare for murals like these to survive centuries of refurbishments. They were inexpensive decorations to begin with so there was little incentive to go to the trouble of preserving them when changes were made to the buildings. Researchers checked the archives after the murals were rediscovered and the last eye-witness account of the wall paintings was recorded in around 1738.

The paintings were preserved by benign neglect thanks to their covered location in the roof. That location also means they won’t go on display, unfortunately. They will, however, be restored and stabilized in situ.