Romans in the news

With sandals that look fresher than last year’s Birkenstocks, gossipy messages recovered from writing tablets and 73,000 shards of pottery, London Museum’s new collection is like falling head-first into the first centuryArchaeologists don’t always get lucky when a site is redeveloped in the middle of London. People have been building in the city for millennia and, in more recent times, bombing it. But if the building before went too deep, or there has been too much exposure to the air by bomb damage in the past, there won’t be much to find. Things were especially bad before 1991, when there was no planning protection for anything but scheduled ancient monuments. “We used to have to beg to get on site,” says Sophie Jackson, archaeologist at Museum of London Archaeology (Mola).It’s not that developers are insensitive, says Jackson: “When we did the excavation at Barts hospital, [it] was functioning above us – we were right under the MRI machines. Developers recognise the social value.” It’s just that the stars don’t often align. Continue reading…

Archaeologists hail discovery of near-2,000-year-old structure as one of most significant recent finds in the cityThe remains of London’s earliest Roman basilica have been discovered under an office block, in what archaeologists have described as one of the most significant recent discoveries in the capital.The almost 2,000-year-old structure was part of the forum, the Roman capital’s social and administrative centre, and built around the late 70s or early 80s AD, just a few decades after the Romans invaded Britain and 20 years after Boudicca sacked and burned the city in AD60. Continue reading…

My father, Donald Gordon, who has died aged 90, enjoyed two successful and influential careers, first in education and then in Roman history, as he put Trimontium, Scotland’s largest Roman fort, back on the map.Donald was one of the key founders of the Trimontium Trust in the late 1980s, following an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to move the route of the Melrose bypass away from the Roman site, which neighboured Donald’s village of Newstead, in the Borders. Continue reading…

Archaeologists hail discovery of very rare hoard featuring 44 gold coins bearing name of Celtic king CunobelinusA hoard of British coins bearing the inscription of King Cunobelin and found in a Dutch field have been identified as very likely to be the spoils of war of a Roman soldier from the conquest of Britain.The 44 gold coins, known as staters, were discovered alongside 360 Roman coins, by two amateur archaeologists with metal detectors in a field in Bunnik, near Utrecht. The coins are believed to have been given as military pay. Continue reading…

The mutatio, on Ermin Street linking Silchester and Gloucester, would have provided a place for travellers to rest or change horsesAt Gloucester services on the M5, travellers are resting and refuelling, taking a break from the demands of the road.Just a few miles east, scores of archaeologists are completing a two-year project that has unearthed a forerunner of the site, a 2,000-year-old Roman take on the service station. Continue reading…

Using cutting-edge methods, Alexandra Morton-Hayward is cracking the secrets of ancient brains – even as hers betrays her. By Kermit Pattison Continue reading…

Genetic analysis of Roman soldier or gladiator buried in York reveals 25% of his ancestry came from ScandinaviaPeople with Scandinavian ancestry were in Britain long before the Anglo-Saxons or the Vikings turned up, researchers have found after studying the genetics of an ancient Roman buried in York.The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons brought an influx of Scandinavians to ancient Britain in the fifth century, with the first major Viking raid – which targeted the monastery at Lindisfarne – occurring in AD793. Continue reading…

Dr Ulla Rajala says the programme has given state school pupils the same opportunities as those in the private sector, and should not be axedIt has been reported that the government is going to scrap the Latin excellence programme in February. If this goes ahead, we can only lament the shortsightedness of the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson. The programme has allowed students in state schools to read Latin in key stages 3 and 4, and prepare for GCSEs in the subject, giving them the same opportunities as students in private schools.Latin has provided English with a large chunk of its vocabulary and helps to understand the grammar. Latin developed into the Romance languages and can help in learning French, Spanish and Italian. Latin and Greek are behind medical vocabulary, and biological names of species are in Latin. The Romans, who wrote and spoke in Latin, gave Britain straight roads, toilets and city walls. Latin literature is the basis of western literary culture, and Roman law is reflected in our legislation. Latin also supports rhetoric and logical thinking. Continue reading…

Archaeologist, curator at the British Museum and leading expert in the field of Greco-Roman medicineAs an archaeologist, material culture specialist and expert on Roman Britain, Ralph Jackson, who has died from cancer aged 73, created an impressive body of work during nearly four decades as a curator at the British Museum.He was a leading expert in the field of Greco-Roman medicine, and one of very few scholars who specialised in its material aspects, specifically surgical instruments and paraphernalia recovered in excavation. His 1988 book Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire has sold thousands of copies across the English-speaking world. Continue reading…

Using cutting-edge methods, Alexandra Morton-Hayward is cracking the secrets of ancient brains – even as hers betrays herAlexandra Morton-Hayward, a 35-year-old mortician turned molecular palaeontologist, had been behind the wheel of her rented Vauxhall for five hours, motoring across three countries, when a torrential storm broke loose on the plains of Belgium. Her wipers pulsed at full speed as the green fields of Flanders turned a blurry grey. Behind her sat a small, black picnic cooler. Within 24 hours, it would be full of human brains – not modern specimens, but brains that had contemplated this landscape as far back as the middle ages and had, miraculously, remained intact.For centuries, archaeologists have been perplexed by discoveries of ancient skeletons devoid of all soft tissue, except what Morton-Hayward cheerfully described as “just a brain rattling around in a skull”. At Oxford, where she is a doctoral candidate, she has gathered the world’s largest collection of ancient brains, some as old as 8,000 years. Additionally, after poring over centuries of scientific literature, she has tallied a staggering catalogue of cases – more than 4,400 preserved brains as old as 12,000 years. Using advanced technologies such as mass spectrometry and particle accelerators, she is leading a new effort to reveal the molecular secrets that have enabled some human brains to survive longer than Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza. Continue reading…