Archaeologists rebury ‘first-of-its-kind’ Roman villa | Hacker News Reader

Archaeologists rebury ‘first-of-its-kind’ Roman villa

smithsonianmag.com

139 pointspepys93 comments

I'm not an archeologist or historian, but it has been my impression that high-status roman villas typically had rooms linked by courtyards. In that regard, this villa seems to be particularly interesting, given that it appears to be rooms with a central tower. In that regard, I'd be curious to know why they believe it is a villa rather than say, military in nature, especially given the history of the Romans in Britain.

I'm going out on a limb here with speculation: wall paint, tesserae and other signs of high status finishes to interior, and things like a hypocaust and food preparation spaces which don't meet the formalisms of a military facility. That said, I read of military owned staging posts with pretty high investment features like baths. 5 star roadside hotels for senior staffers and government officials on the move. So dual use, or military but fancy is possible. Also not an archaeologist

Yep I think it’s possible that someone on the outpost of their society might still want some semblance of their civilization while they are there.

The tower isn't central. That picture is not of the entire villa.

Here's a video that shows more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGpdirRWJMA I recommend watching with sound off.

Wouldn't a tower have thicker walls? Medieval towers have walls that are several meters thick

The Romans were way ahead of their time in terms of construction ability and plenty of the stuff made much later is downright crude by comparison.

Construction techniques aside, what was siege technology like in the Roman era? Did they build walls to resist heavy thrown rocks, or just arrows and infantry?

Catapults and other torsion where during the Roman empire, though the thickness of walls also related to how tall they needed to be to be effective. Anything under 30 feet is easy to get over using simple ladders.

The Trebuchet is plenty old enough, but we don't have evidence of use by Rome.

As far as I know, it depends on what you mean by trebuchet. Counterpoise trebuchets (using heavy weights) are definitely medieval.

Yes, the giant weapons most people think of when they hear the term trebuchet is medieval improvement allowing people to further scale up the design. A mangonel (traction trebuchet) is the older design, but trebuchet is referring any scaled up staff sling.

Siege towers, battering rams mostly. The most effective siege technology was probably hunger... crude but quite effective.

Oh and this is another thing they brought to bear on cities unwilling to bend to the Roman boot (or Sandal):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballista

and even more here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_and_Roman_artillery

Not as effective as taunts and cows, perfected by the French.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey0wvGiAH9g

Greek and Roman catapults were lighter than medieval trebuchets, using tension or torsion springs rather than heavy weights, but were reasonably capable of hurling rocks well enough to take down a wall eventually. I don't have an example offhand, but the Romans were more than happy to build thick walls to resist sieges if they needed to. My impression is that, fortification-wise, Romans preferred walls and ditches rather than single highly-fortified buildings like castles.

On the other hand, Roman architecture was such that they did not need very thick stone walls to support high buildings.

I think we may all be assuming that the round foundation necessarily means tower, when it could just be a round room. Any ancient Roman architecture experts care to weigh in?

Could it have been built for military but then taken over and given a fresh coat of paint (or mosaics, as the case may be) by the new civilian tenant?

Gonna shill Time Team for anyone interested in seeing what these villa digs look like. It’s a British archaeology series with a reality TV twist: they bring a big team of professional archaeologists and do as much digging/surveying as they can in three days per site. Twenty one seasons of it, with the vast majority officially available on YouTube - and they’re in the process of a reboot, which has been remarkably successful thus far.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vYCRaztndtk

Yep, love Time Team! The original series is what I use to go to sleep every night.

Also a drinking game - drink every time Phil says "flint, evidence of burning, postholes, or 'stone the crows'". Or yells at Tony for getting in a trench without permission.

How do you go to sleep watching Phil Harding's legs in those too-short cut-offs?

:-)

Anyone who has watched Time Team understands why this took place.

England is filthy with Roman ruins, among other sorts. But only when you have a noteworthy celebrity, a reality TV show, and everything that is involved in that, do you have an opportunity to even scrape the surface on many of these sites. The funding just isn't there.

The work is hard, complex, interdisciplinary, and mostly unsexy. But the findings are sometimes incredible.

> But only when you have a noteworthy celebrity, a reality TV show, and everything that is involved in that, do you have an opportunity to even scrape the surface on many of these sites. The funding just isn't there.

Or proposed building works - most day-to-day archaeology is funded by developers as part of the planning process.

History is full of instances of barbarism masquerading as archaeology, so gently investigating then reburying sites seems like an enlightened approach.

I get the wish to preserve but I don’t understand why burry it back? Why not encase it in a temperature/climate controlled structure? I’ve seen plenty archaeological digs like this. Is it due to money or why?

The soil itself also contains information. Not disturbing that unless necessary will let future archaeologists with better technology extract more information.

Also, I'm guessing that the sand encasing the site is a temperature/climate controlled structure when buried properly. No sunlight and no air, for starters.

That's a valid argument against ever performing any dig whatsoever, since it's always true that future archeologists might have better technology to extract more information from anything you find.

Thankfully, there is a suitable middle ground of extracting some reasonable amount of information now and preserving some of the site for later.

Catch-22: since future archaeologists have better technology, no digs are performed right now—thus archaeological technology is not needed, and there is no pressure to improve it.

I imagine the newer tech comes from outside archaeology

Radar, X-ray, that sort of thing

They had radar and geomagnetic mapping back in the 1990s, at least - Time team did ~250 digs that were broadcast on channel 4 and are now all on youtube, most in HD now.

And "geophysics" were used to decide what and where to dig in most of them. They're making new episodes now, as well.

https://www.youtube.com/c/TimeTeamClassics

They were examples of technology that came from outside of archaeology. I don't know what the future tech is called as I've not seen it yet :P

Exactly right. This is a question that archaeologists are always supposed to ask before digging. If there's a justification for having the answer now (like an immediate research need or a threat to the site), then excavation may proceed. Even then, you excavate as little as you need as nondestructively as possible. Usually that'll be a single trench/pit you excavate with hand tools and re-cover when you're finished.

Most regions have databases full of known sites that are unexcavated because there's never been a justification for digging.

Knowledge for knowledge sake is not considered justification?

I suspect the missing bit of context here is that we have a lot more potential sites than that we have archaeologists with the time and budget to investigate all of them.

So in programmer terms, most potential sites never make it out of the priority queue

It might be, if you have infinite amounts of time and resources and expertise.

Compared to a fully equipped and financed archeology team from today, which is not the case. Those who discovered the site know they are underequipped and underfunded for the specific site. In this case, reburying is cheap and effective.

Correct. This is why like 99% of all known archeological sites is still unexcavated in parts of the world.

From the article:

> In some cases, resources (like money, staff and proper materials) are not available to properly maintain the site.

This. This stuff happens all the time. So there is a new construction planned somewhere, workers accidentally find some walls etc. Archeological team is dispatched, they remove much more ground, as much as to see how big the object(s) are, what era, figure out they have a archeological gold mine. But they don't have resources (money) allocated for it yet, so they will rebury it. Next year, or in the coming years they'll come back and do the proper excavation. And if I may add a bit sarcastically, a PhD or three.

Yes, cost. Enclosing an entire estate in a climate controlled structure in northern England is very expensive.

Damage comes in many forms and temperature/climate controlled rooms only prevent a certain kind of damage.

The ancient city of Palmyra was irreparably destroyed by Isis in 2015. No amount of climate control would have protected it from the explosive charges that destroyed it.

Reburying sites like these will better protect them from deliberate damage and incidental damage from wars and such. Archaeologists deal with a timescale that often can’t assume political stability of the area where they dig stuff up. It’s better to not assume that future generations will pay the electric bill to keep the site preserved.

The archeologists basically studied for the last year, what being buried in that climate and that kind of soil does to the structure. So they understand extremely well if reburying is a good idea or not.

Sure. The main tensions in archaeology are:

1) It was first established by European men and women looting to fill their “curio cabinets,” which makes it hard to position it as a noble field.

2) digging something up later (with more advanced technology) will always be better than digging it up now. There’s even some people who believe the only ethical archaeology is that which occurs before an area would be otherwise destroyed (i.e. before a construction project happens)

The above makes career archaeologists (at least the good ones) a bit neurotic. This seems like an example of that, I just hope their preservation methods aren’t accidentally destructive.

I can't think of a single field of study that wasn't established by Europeans seeking status, except possibly for mathematics which was established by Babylonians seeking grains.

Recognising that history is important to not repeating it.

A whole lot of status-seeking goes on in science today.

Sure but physics wasn’t “this thing in your country is cool, I’m taking it home with me”

There is a clear difference there.

Imagine if the British Crown Jewels were in a museum in Iran right now!

If physics had somehow involved taking stuff from India they would have done it, which shows that the problem was with the attitude of the colonial era conquerors to the countries they took over rather than with archeology. In fact, a lot of the "they took the crown jewels" stuff has nothing to do with archeology at all.

I'm not so sure "leaving it in the dirt" is a valid conservation technique. Else museums would be full of boxes of dirt.

I recall when Siberia melted (yes, it melted) ephemera were appearing as the snow and ice disappeared. Even here on HN folks argued emotionally about "leaving it all where it was" instead of collecting it. Even though it would be gone in literally days (fibre bags, lost arrows with fragile fletchings, and on and on) and not collectable later, as it immediately rotted or the wind blew it to pieces.

There's a cult of "leave it where it is!" that defies rationality. So that's part of the equation too.

I went to the British Museum when I was in my twenties and it was not an experience I will repeat. That is not a place of honor, and even in a time before I became more aware of the concerns and troubles of indigenous peoples I felt uncomfortable the entire time I was in there.

It wasn’t a celebration of history. It was a dragon’s hoard.

Would you rather have Rosetta used as a recycled building material? And half of the artifacts recovered in Mesopotamia later destroyed by radical islamists?

I think they are saying that they would prefer the artifacts to remain in the countries where they were found. Saying that the artifacts would be destroyed if they were not taken to the British Museum seems a bit too much.

I don't think it is "a bit much"

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/150901-is...

Iraq? From 1958 to 2003 Iraq preserved its cultural heritage fine. Then the UK invaded and the Iraq museum treasures were lost. The UK of course blames this on the Iraqis. The country is thrown into turmoil, to a tut-tut by upper middle class white westerners about how the Arabs aren't preserving their cultural heritage. This is why Arabs fighting against colonialism and imperialism fly planes into the Pentagon.

How about when Isis blew up those buddhist statues?

Assuming you're referring to the Buddhas of Bamiyan, those were blown up by the Taliban, not ISIS.

> Iraq preserved its cultural heritage fine. Then the UK invaded

If only it preserved human rights and lifes of it's citizens as fine. The only thing that US and coalition did wrong with Iraq was not killing off Saddam in '91 and leaving Iraq under his reign of terror for 12 more years.

Unfortunately, it looks like appeasing bloody dictators is a West's thing lately.

Why is the US responsible for Iraq again?

It’s exactly the same sort of paternalism that tore apart the British empire in the first place.

You guys are too stupid to take care of this obelisk so we’re just going to take it. K bye.

Even if you’re 100% right you look like an asshole, and if you don’t repatriate it when the place has a stable government then you’re just proving your rationalization was fully self-serving.

An interesting case is the Pergamon museum in Berlin, which as an aside is an absolutely breathtaking museum to visit. Most of the big exhibits like the Ishtar gate were in place by the 1930s, where they subsequently experienced WW2. The market gate in particular was damaged by bombs and had to be restored after the war. That restoration failed due to improper conservation and more work had to be done in the 2000s.

As far as I'm aware, there's never been serious discussion of the safety of things in Berlin though. Considerations of safety really only go one way.

I will say that my ex was a fan of a particular Spanish artist, and she was very upset to discover only while standing in the Spanish wing of the Louvre that her favorite painting had been repatriated to Spain, and only some small examples of his work remained. Google was only an infant at the time, and learning about art history from a book has its limitations.

I couldn’t blame them for wanting a famous work back for their own museum, but it was a major bummer all the same. But Spain is not iron curtain era Berlin, or a tumultuous Middle East, so it’s hardly a fair comparison. It’s difficult to find a balance, but what we know of peak British Empire, from every emancipated colony, is that they just didn’t care.

People like to complain about how arrogant the US is and I just think of that old anti drug commercial, “I learned it from watching you, Dad.” Parents who do drugs have kids who do drugs.

Looks like the British Empire was proven right when you look at what's happening in Iraq now. The artifacts predate the people in the regions in many cases.

There are, in fact, a very wide range of options between "have the British steal it" and "destroy it".

The most likely option being "the British destroying a lot in order to steal a bit".

Destroyed like the English banning the Irish language in schools in trying to destroy the Irish language?

Insofar as radical Islamists, the English sided with and supported radical Islamists in Iran against Mossadegh and then against the secular left under the Shah. The English supported Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Watch Lawrence of Arabia, they do it and celebrate it. The English saving secular socialist pan-Arab nationalism against radical Islamists? Please.

The real destruction of artifacts was the destruction of Iraq Museum during the UK's unprovoked invasion of that country. Which they of course blamed on Iraqis. These people are transparent.

As a Gaelic speaker (Scot's Gaelic) I feel you on the point about Irish Gaelic in schools. It's pretty shocking how hypocritical and selfish the English government/crown has been throughout history. They can try and cover it up, but at the end of the day, they're really just stealing things and getting away with it cause they're rich, powerful, and militarily dominant compared to their targets.

All those monuments that happened to find themselves in ISIS and Taliban areas of control say hi.

That doesn’t excuse the actions and behaviors of the invaders who stole these artifacts dozens or hundreds of years before isis was even a thing.

Btw things like isis are a direct consequence of actions taken by the English colonialists when they created artificial boundaries.

Which is why china, vietnam, and korea never recovered. That good old colonialist narrative has its place, but given enough time and counter examples, it just lacks the explenation power it once had. Which is a dangerous gap the left left open, for the racist idiots to settle in.

Regarding the region.

The societal rot had already set in way before that. The whole ottoman empire was on a down trend, ever since the trade went around them. Which is a good indicator how low value was whatever they themselves had to produce and to offer.

To life in the shadow and ruins of the glorious past, it burns all men for what are they but lowcast creatures, fallen from up high..

> Which is why china, vietnam, and korea never recovered.

What does economic performance have to do with the British museums being filled with looted cultural artifacts? You could have thrown in Greece in there (EU member), but Greece also wants it's looted artifacts back.

What has it to do with economics?

China's case was very different as well, the majority of the population (Han Chinese) were ruled by a foreign race (Qing) that were racist towards them in 1800s. Many Han Chinese fought alongside foreign powers and they did loot a lot.

And it doesn't matter anyway, CCP rise to power and smashed everything in the name of Cultural Revolution.

I meant that the economic discussion is off topic concerning the subject in the article as well as the thread on looted cultural artifacts.

> Btw things like isis are a direct consequence of actions taken by the English colonialists when they created artificial boundaries

The Turks were the ones that conquered all those completely unrelated people in the first place. The British inherited their problem after World War I. But go on, I love this game of “brown people can’t have moral agency.”

Yes, the Turks also put their hands in the boiling pot, but only the British were arrogant enough to try to turn these regions into countries with neat, straight borders and also with western style governments. Which destroyed local alliances and created a massive power vacuum when the empire fell. Then, the us and Russia had a go of it, which certainly didn’t calm the situation.

But go on.

great, now do versailles.

or brest-litovsk.

a bad peace treaty is not an excuse for barbarism.

I believe that ancient artifacts belong to all humanity, so whoever is equipped best keep them safe to preserve them for us and posterity should have it.

On the same topic, I don't think that people of modern Turkey or Greece have more valid claim on the remains of Troy or Mycenae just because the people who have left these remains have one occupied the plot of land that now lies within their borders.

https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/why-did-people-start-e...

"By the 19th century, people were no longer consuming mummies to cure illness but Victorians were hosting "unwrapping parties" where Egyptian corpses would be unwrapped for entertainment at private parties."

That was callous, to be sure. But remember, mummies were being ground into fertilizer at an industrial scale. Or so I remember. Egyptians were often little more respectful of their history than outsiders.

> I became more aware of the concerns and troubles of indigenous peoples

What a weirdly condescending comment.

I've always had the somewhat silly thought to myself "What if the archaeological record only goes back to the point of past archaeologists digging everything up?"

Soooo dissapointed..

In my hast i read it as…

Archaeologists [REBUILD] ‘First-of-Its-Kind’ Roman Villa

Would have been fantastic to see it rebuilt rather than reburied

It seems reasonable to want to ensure proper excavation and to therefore rebury if the budget is not available to preserve or process the excavation, however it is still rather tragic, perhaps these articles will give the project enough visibility to chase better funding.

Kinda stingy with the pictures. I'd like to see a photo showing the excellent craftsmanship the article discusses.

Usually the evidence of craftsmanship is fragmentary. Ornamental decorations such as engraving and paints survive on bits of structure, plaster, and statuary that allow experts to reconstruct the larger whole.

There are some pictures (13) on the local newspaper's site, but they're mostly similar aerial shots and there's not really any crafsmanship on display:

https://www.thescarboroughnews.co.uk/news/people/in-pictures...

I didn't know "reburying" was a thing but I like the idea.

It's pretty common. If the site isn't about to be turned into the foundations of a new supermarket (This is a common fate for archaeological sites), you can't just leave an open pit behind. People might fall in! Plus everything deteriorates faster when exposed to the elements. Erecting a building to protect the site might be a nice idea... If you had a lot of money and nothing else to do with it. Some ruins will attract tourists if you build a nice museum around them, but most are too uninteresting or remote to attract enough people to make this worthwhile.

Reburying sites is standard practice. They survived hundreds or thousands of years buried under dirt, so putting the dirt back may help preserve them for hundreds or thousands of years more.

Another practice that may surprise you is that archaeologists often dig up only parts of a site, deliberately. i.e. They'll leave some parts where they think there's something interesting untouched. They do this because digging is a destructive process. Any information that can be gleaned from digging up a site has to be done with the technology and methods of the day. Archaeologists of the future might be able to learn substantially more than archaeologists of today from the same column of earth. So, you dig up only part of the site and leave other parts completely untouched so that future archaeologists can return and learn things you couldn't.

Seems that archaeologists are some of the few people who care about the future, as well as the past.

One very common justification archaeologists give for their field existing beyond heritage preservation is that it can help inform our own responses to future events. Archaeology/history is our only long-term view of societies and how they've adapted to changing conditions historically.

The actual application of that research remains a bit limited though.

It doesn't necessarily have to have a direct future-looking application; just comprehending why things are the way they are today, has value in itself - particularly in the political sphere.

"when investigating land slated for a housing development" what happens to the owners/developers when this type of thing happens? Are they reimbursed by the state?

People have been building on top of previously occupied sites or tearing down buildings to build new ones for our entire history. Suddenly in the latter half of the 1900s it was decided preserving these sites was for some reason I can't comprehend vitally important. We have chosen to stagnate because of the actions of prior generations.

Mostly a case-by-case thing, I think. I know (from watching Time Team) that in Britain there are a fair number of fields which the farmer can farm, but can't dig deeper than that due to the archaeology. Other cases have existing buildings ("Oh, by the way, you have an iron-age cemetery under your house. Enjoy!"). In cases of new development, it would be investigated pretty thoroughly to determine whether it should be protected (involving negotiations with the developer), or either entirely excavated or just left and the development continues.

Wow I had no idea archeologists do this, but it makes perfect sense. Reminds me of a commented TODO in code when time or resources do not allow a proper implementation.

Good riddance. I'm sure the folk of Scarborough don't want another occurrence of https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-ghost-of-mrs-payne...

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