A team of University archaeologists, led by Associate Professor of Roman Archaeology Dr Will Bowden, will be the first for 75 years to excavate within the town walls of the Roman settlement Venta Icenoruma, at present day Caistor St Edmund in Norfolk.

Dr Bowden said: “The new excavations follow the successful 2009 season at Venta Icenorum during which Roman burials were unearthed and we are hoping to uncover something equally as exciting during this latest project. No-one has dug in the town itself for 75 years and so it’s a remarkable opportunity to really get to the heart of one of Norfolk’s archaeological jewels.”

The Roman town is thought to have been established in the aftermath of Boudica’s failed rebellion in AD60/61. The new town was founded in the heart of the Iceni territory, functioning as its regional capital. It has been long suspected that the Roman town was built on top of a major Iceni settlement, perhaps a tribal centre,. Geophysical surveys carried out by Tthe University of Nottingham team rein Caistor project reinforced this impression, showing possible prehistoric features beneath all the areas of the Roman town. The aim is to establish whether the Roman town occupies the site of a much older settlement and to establish when precisely the streets of the Roman town were laid out. It is also hoped to find out if the town continued beyond the Roman period.

Parts of the site were excavated from 1929 to 1935 following the publication of dramatic aerial photographs showing the streets and public buildings but the site has since lain undisturbed. The site is now a Scheduled Ancient Monument owned by the Norfolk Archaeological Trust and managed in partnership with South Norfolk Council.

The excavations are open to the public, free of charge, seven days a week until Saturday September 11. As well as the excavations there will be a small exhibition and activities for children. Their discoveries are also filmed by Channel 4’s Time Team, as part of a special documentary due to be aired in the New Year.

Funding for the new project has been raised partly through The University of Nottingham and partly through Caistor Roman Project Ltd, a charitable company set up to help the work. Support comes from the British Academy which has given £67,000 to support three seasons of excavations, and the South Norfolk Alliance, which has contributed £13,600 to support the project’s programme of more than 150 volunteers.

As for the 2009 excavations, May Gurney Ltd and A Plant are providing all the heavy equipment for the project. May Gurney’s connections with Caistor Roman town extend back to 1929, when it supplied the tools for the original excavation.

Source: University of Nottingham

By A.N. Angelakis, D. Koutsoyiannis, and G. Tchobanoglous

Water Research, Vol. 39:1 (2005)

Abstract: The status of urban wastewater and stormwater systems in ancient Greece is reviewed, based on the results of archaeological studies of the 20th century. Emphasis is given to the construction, operation, and management of wastewater and stormwater systems during the Minoan period (2nd millennium B.C.). The achievements of this period in dealing with the hygienic and the functional requirements of palaces and cities, were so advanced that they can only be compared to modern urban water systems, developed in Europe and North America in the second half of the 19th century A.D. The advanced Minoan technologies were exported to all parts of Greece in later periods of the Greek civilization, i.e. in Mycenaean, Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods.

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By L.W. Mays, D. Koutsoyiannis, and A. N. Angelakis

Water Science and Technology: Water Supply, Vol. 7 :1 (2007)

Abstract: A brief history of ancient water supply techniques for urban areas from the earliest civilizations through the Roman times is presented. Throughout the history of urban centers, a sufficient water supply has been the backbone of each city. All sources of water, rivers, lakes, springs, underground sources, and rainwater collection, were exploited for urban supply starting from the earliest civilizations. The specific choice was depending upon the civilization, the geomorphology, the topography, and the local climatic and hydrological conditions. No large-scale lifting techniques were available; thus, water was transferred from the source by aqueducts from a higher altitude. Cisterns used for collection of rain water and wells for drawing groundwater were very well developed since the Bronze Age. During historical times, Greeks and later Romans reached a high level of water supply technologies that greatly influenced modern achievements in water engineering and management.

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The Auxilia in Roman Britain and the Two Germanies from Augustus to Caracalla: Family, Religion and ‘Romanization’

By David Cuff

PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2010

Abstract: This thesis examines the cultural and social relationships cultivated by ethnically diverse auxiliary soldiers in the western Roman empire. These soldiers were enrolled in the Roman auxilia, military units that drew primarily on the non-Roman subjects of the empire for their recruits in numbers that equaled the legionaries.

I argue that auxiliary soldiers could and did maintain large families, and demonstrate, from epigraphic data collected and presented in my dissertation, how foreign ethnic and religious identities were variously integrated into Roman military culture by both individual auxiliaries and the Roman state. The history of the auxilia in Germany from the time of Augustus and in Britain from the time of Claudius is discussed, with extensive reference to epigraphic material provided in appendices to this work. Analysis of military diplomas from across the Roman empire demonstrates a significant phenomenon of auxiliary family creation that helps to contextualize the diploma data from Germania and Britannia. Research on further epigraphic evidence from Germania and Britannia demonstrates a marked diversity in religious dedications by auxiliary soldiers and further evidence for auxiliary families.

From a discussion of the history of the concept of ‘Romanization’ and other theoretical models that can be applied to the study of the auxilia, the continued usefulness of the evolving concept of ‘Romanization’ to our understanding of auxiliary cultural integration is assessed. Auxiliary service is shown to have provided many non-Roman ethnic groups avenues of cultural and legal inclusion that each soldier, surely in his own way, could exploit.

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Commercial Amphoras: The Earliest Consumer Packages?

By Diana Twede

Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 22 No. 1 (2002)

Introduction: This article presents the hypothesis that the ancient commercial amphora was not only a very well-designed shipping container, but it may have been the first “consumer package” as well.We know very little about ancient packaging because so little of it has survived. Amphoras are a notable exception because of their slowness to degrade and have been found throughout the Mediterranean, dating from about 1500 B.C. to 500 A.D. They are the earliest commercial packages for which samples exist.

Amphoras performed the same functions that are expected from packages today. In them, wine, oil, and other processed food products were supplied to households and institutions. They were key to export trade. They served as “silent salesmen” to convey information about the contents’ origin, type, and grade. Many identified the merchant. They even had tamper- evident closures to ensure “truth in packaging.”

But their shape and material is not like any package that we use today. This package, for liquid, which is a most difficult type of product to carry and ship, dominated trade for more than 2,000 years and was pointed on the bottom! This article explores the reasons.

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The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and the death of Gaius Plinius Secundus

By Francois Retief and Louise P. Cilliers

Acta Theologica, Vol.26:2 (2006)

Abstract: The effect of the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, which led inter alia to the death of Pliny the Elder, is reviewed. Pliny, the admiral of the Roman imperial fleet, wished as scientist to witness the event from close by and set sail in the direction of Vesuvius, but got trapped in Stabiae, a few kilometers from Pompeii, where he died together with thousands of inhabitants of nearby villages. Various reasons have been advanced to account for his death (asphyxiation caused by respiratory problems, carbon dioxide poisoning, heart failure, advanced coronary sclerosis). Basing our findings on the description of the catastrophe in the letters of his nephew, the younger Pliny, we believe that the most probable diagnosis which also fits his description of his uncle’s behaviour and symptoms during his last hours, is that of acute and fatal bronchoconstriction in a chronic asthmatic.

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The dry weather has created hundreds of cropmark sites – the process where crops grow at a different rate over buried features – to be seen from the air. A Roman camp near Bradford Abbas, Dorset, was found after three sides appeared in parched barley fields. The lightly built defensive enclosure would have provided basic protection for Roman soldiers while on manoeuvres in the first century AD and is one of only four discovered in the south west of England.

Meanwhile at Newton Kyme, near Tadcaster, in North Yorkshire, a 2,000-year-old Roman fort was found through photographs taken from an airplane. The images revealed stone walls up to three metres thick and a ditch 15 metres wide.

Dave MacLeod, an English Heritage senior investigator based in York, said: “It’s hard to remember a better year. Cropmarks are always at their best in dry weather, but the last few summers have been a disappointment. This year we have taken full advantage of the conditions. We try to concentrate on areas that in an average year don’t produce much archaeology.”

“Sorties to the West Midlands and Cumbria, together with more local areas such as the Yorkshire Wolds and Vale of York, have all been very rewarding,” he added.

Source: English Heritage

The discovery of the remains of this mud-brick settlement at the Umm Mawagir area in the Kharga Oasis, which functioned as an administrative center as well as major supplier of bread, stands to shed new light on an obscure era in Egyptian history, the Second Intermediate Period, when rival factions contended for domination of what had been a prosperous state united under Pharaonic rule, asserts Darnell.

During this period, invaders from Asia, the Hyksos, seized control of the Nile Delta in the north; the Nubian kingdom of Kerma was centered in the south, and what remained of Pharaonic power struggled to survive in the Thebaid, the region around modern Luxor. Egyptologists have focused on these three contending groups during this intermediate period, and how the weakest of these, the Pharaonic forces based in Thebes, managed to come out on top has always been something of a mystery, says Darnell.

Predating the only other major settlement in Kharga Oasis by some thousand years, the recently discovered town stretches over a kilometer in the southern Kharga oasis, a location long-held to have been an uninhabited no-man’s land, but which, Darnell says, was actually a hub for caravan routes connecting the Nile Valley of Egypt to what is now Western Sudan.

During the excavations remains of large administrative mudbrick structures were found. These buildings consisted of rooms and halls similar to administrative buildings previously found in several sites in the Nile Valley. These sites may have been used as a lookout post as part of the administrative center of the settlement. Part of an ancient bakery was also found with two ovens and a potter’s wheel, used to make the ceramic bread molds in which the bread was baked. The amount of remains from the debris dumps outside the bakery suggest that the settlement produced a food surplus and may have produced enough bread literally to feed an army, suggests a fourth faction with strong ties to Pharaonic culture flourished in this Western region.

“The Western Desert of the Second Intermediate Period may well have been wild, but it was not disorganized,” comments Darnell on the significance of finding a sophisticated urban development in an area thought to have been a wasteland.

Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), said that the newly discovered settlement is 1km long from north to south and 250m wide from east to west. It lies along the bustling caravan routes connecting the Nile Valley of Egypt and the western oasis with points as far as Darfur in western Sudan. Hawass continued that archaeological evidence at the site indicated that its inhabitants were part of an administrative center and they were engaged in baking on a massive scale.

Beyond that, the Yale Egyptologist ventures that the fourth oasis state that he believes occupied this important trade route, may have formed an alliance with Thebes. This might explain how the vestiges of Pharaonic power came to prevail over their adversaries, eventually to establish the Golden Age of the Egyptian Empire.

The Yale expedition that led to the discovery of the town is part of the “Theban Desert Road Survey,” an ongoing mission to map and study the ancient caravan routes of the Egyptian Western Desert. Now in its 19th season, the Survey was created and is run by Deborah Darnell and John Darnell. Among the important discoveries their expedition has made are the Scorpion tableau, perhaps the earliest historical record of the foundation of a unified Upper Egyptian state at the dawn of Dynasty 0; the earliest datable alphabetic inscriptions in the Wadi el-Hol; and important archaeological remains of the formative pre-dynastic and Protodynastic Periods. The Theban Desert Road Survey is an expedition of the Yale Egyptological Institute in Egypt, of which Darnell is the director and Deborah Darnell the administrator. “The discovery of the Umm Mawagir site dovetails nicely with Deborah’a many years of work on Second Intermediate Period material in the Theban Western Desert,” says her long-time co-director.

Sources: Yale University, Dr. Hawass

Ethnic recruitment and military mobility

By Carol van Driel-Murray

XXth International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies (2006)

Introduction: It is commonly accepted that while ethnic recruitment and the stationing of auxiliary regiments far from their homelands formed part of Roman frontier policy in the 1st century, the more settled conditions of the 2nd century soon led to a situation where soldiers were recruited and stationed locally. But is this so? Is the available evidence sufficient for such conclusions to be drawn, or is the reality more complex?

Removing troublesome youth from tribal societies has always featured in the strategy of expanding states, and military recruitment is an efficient method of achieving this aim, while being compatible with the warrior ethos inherent in many of the groups involved. In terms of military strategy, therefore, ethnic recruitment was as relevant in the 2nd century as in the 1st. Actually tracing the movement of the soldiers themselves is beset with difficulties but indirect means may offer better perspectives, and it is in this context that the role of military families and dependents takes on a new importance.

The belief that Roman soldiers lived in virtuous celibacy has long been dispelled, and military families were clearly a fact of army life. Examining the material legacy of these families is not, however, just a case of adding human interest to military history, for in their adherence to regional costume and pottery traditions, it is especially the women who give us an insight into the maintenance of links with the far-off homeland and the course of ethnic recruitment.

Here I will touch on four instances of tribal recruitment –three of them from the Netherlands– where it can be shown that family members from the home region accompanied the soldiers to their new stations: Batavians (1st and 2nd century), Frisians (late 2nd and 3rd century), the Germanic forces at Cuijk (4th century) and the Germanic levies in the Taunus forts (late 2nd early 3rd century). From these case studies, it will appear that the ethnic identity of units was maintained for much longer than is usually thought, and that the movement of families was a regular occurrence, not only confined to the officer class. It can indeed be argued that the great migrations of the 4th and 5th centuries merely continued existing practices.

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The excavation, which was commissioned by the Highways Agency,  started in July 2009 and was completed this summer. It has given experts a rare opportunity to investigate a Roman site devoted to industrial activity.

A major feature of the industrial complex was a water powered flour mill used to grind grain and produce food for the garrison and other units travelling along the Roman road of Dere Street – which is now the A1 motorway. The adjacent buildings, thought to have been occupied up to the 4th century AD, may also have been a supply centre for a wider area.

There is also an indication that the Roman occupants may have worn socks – rust on the nail from a Roman sandal appears to have impressions from fibres which could suggest that a sock-type garment was being worn.

Other artefacts uncovered in the excavations  include animal bones, pottery, coins, metal work and brooches, and 14 human cremations were found in individual pits, along with the well-preserved skeleton of a horse underneath a building. The animal is thought to have been slaughtered as a sacrifice to the gods to bring the building good luck.

Blaise Vyner of AECOM, Cultural Heritage Team Leader for the Joint-Venture contractor Carillion Morgan Sindall, said: ”We know a lot about Roman forts, which have been extensively studied, but to excavate an industrial area with a mill is really exciting. We hope it can tell us more about how such military outposts catered for their needs, as self sufficiency would have been important. The findings show how the route has served people throughout the different periods.

“The industrial area comprised a series of large timber buildings, mostly on the north side of a beck, which powered the mill. It would have supplied the fort with goods and provisions – probably processing meat and other food, as well as flour, and could also have developed into something of a settlement focus in its own right. You only have to look up the road to Catterick to see how garrison towns are serviced by local shops. Perhaps we have something similar here.”

Neil Redfern, English Heritage North Yorkshire and City of York, said: ”The Roman remains at Healam Bridge have illustrated the importance of this site on Dere Street and given us an insight in to industrial processes which had not previously been recognised or understood at the site.

“The time span of the remains uncovered illustrates how the site developed from a frontier fort and settlement to a more settled site with strong local economic role relating to the presence of mills along the banks of the beck. The complexity and depth of deposits were unexpected and the excavation team has dealt with them very professionally.”

Very little is known about the Roman fort itself, which is now a scheduled monument and which only came to light as a result of geophysical surveys carried out in the 1990s in readiness for the A1’s planned upgrading. The line of the new road was adjusted to avoid the main site.

Gary Frost, Highways Agency project manager, said: ”The Highways Agency is committed to protecting this country’s heritage and working with organisations to do so. Throughout we have worked very closely with the experts in the field, including English Heritage, to preserve important archaeology.

“With the A1 we knew we were delivering this essential road improvement scheme in an area rich with history but even so, the findings made were far more than expected. They uncovered a hidden world, showing how the Romans sustained the fort and the surrounding area. The artists’ impression of how the site could have looked really helps bring it to life.”

Further south, work on the A46 in Nottinghamshire has also uncovered archaeological remains dating back to the last Ice Age, together with Iron Age and Roman settlements which have been uncovered as part of a Highways Agency scheme to upgrade the A46 between Newark and Widmerpool.

Among the finds were ancient flint tools and flint knapping debris that date back to about 11,000 BC – this was around the end of the last Ice Age, when Stone Age hunter-gathers returned as the climate began to warm up.

Source: NDS