Immortales: The Hall of Emperors of the Capitoline Museums, Rome brings to the United States for the first time a selection of 20 busts from the collection of the world’s oldest museum, the Capitoline in Rome. The exhibition offers a survey of Roman portraiture from the age of Augustus (1st century, B.C.) to the late Roman Empire (5th century, A.D.). Sculpted busts of emperors, empresses, and patricians reveal how portraits helped craft private and public images of distinguished individuals for ancient Roman audiences as well as for posterity.
My post on what influences modern economic values of antiquities, and how that relates to the values of objects in the ancient Roman world.
Andrew Birley is not only the director of excavations at Vindolanda. He is also the son of Robin Birley, the former director of excavations. And he is the grandson of Eric Birley, a professor who bought this land and began excavating it in 1929.
For nearly a century now, the archaeologists of the Birley family have led the study of this site. They’ve unearthed jewelry, weapons and even wooden writing tablets with the ink still legible. Visitors can see the best of the discoveries in an on-site museum, or on Vindolanda’s Facebook page.
Andrew Birley jokes that his first visit to the site was as an embryo. There’s a photograph of his pregnant mother standing at the dig. He found his first artifact as a teenager.
“It wasn’t that glorious actually,” he says. “It was an enormous cow bone.”
But decades later, he still remembers it vividly.
“You never forget it,” he says. “You never forget your first Roman shoe. When you’ve found 150 to 500 Roman shoes they start to sort of glaze into a sheen, but your first artifact of any description or type is always really special.”
Another thing I wrote. This time it got published! In the Classical Receptions journal!
Back in the early fall, I wrote an entry for the Joukowsky Institute at Brown University ‘Archaeology for the People' competition. The aim of the competition was for archaeologists to sort of translate their scholarly writing into something for the general public without over-simplifying or romanticizing our work.
My entry did not win. Please enjoy my award-losing essay here.
How Breaking a Wishbone Became Tradition
Ancient Romans were the first to see the wishbone as a symbol of luck, which eventually turned into the tradition of actually breaking it apart. A chicken wishbone would be snapped apart by two people while they were each making a wish. The person holding the longer piece was said to have good fortune or a wish granted. If the bone cracked evenly in half, both people would have their wishes come true.
As the Romans traveled through Europe, they brought this tradition with them, and the English eventually adopted this practice too. The tradition of breaking a turkey wishbone started with the Pilgrims, and the actually term of a wishbone was created in United States in the mid 1800s.
Archaeological excavations in the Hellenistic city of Parion, located in the northwestern province of Çanakkale’s Biga district, have revealed a 2,000-year-old footprint that is believed to have belonged to a laborer.
“There is a footprint of a person on a brick. The person lived here 2,000 years ago. Its size shows us that it is a normal footprint. Most probably a worker mistakenly put his foot on the brick. There is also a paw print next to this footprint. We believe that it belongs to the dog of this worker. These prints are interesting findings in terms of archaeological history,” said the head of the excavations, Samsun 19 Mayıs University Archaeology Department Professor Vedat Keleş, hailing the important findings from this year’s excavations.
“The height of ancient Roman-era people is almost the same as the height of today’s people,” he added.
Excavations in the ancient city have been continuing in seven areas, including a southern necropolis, a theater, an odeon and a Roman bath.
Archaeologists have unearthed a stylus wax tablet at the site of a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland.
Believed to be from 105-120AD, the tablet was found just 12in (30cm) from a wooden toilet seat discovered at the same location last month.
The tablet is one of 12 found at Vindolanda this year and one of seven found from the same building level.
Director of excavations, Dr Andrew Birley, said he was “looking forward” to reading the tablet’s text.
The site, near Hexham, has previously revealed gold and silver coins and other artefacts of the Roman army.
