Unearthing history in the heart of ancient Rome. by Derek Wilson. Wanted in Rome: A cremation tomb that has been identified as going back to the 11th or 10th century BC, long before Romulus and Remus appeared on the scene has been uncovered in the Roman forum.

"Looking down into the forums from Via dei Fori Imperiali on the way to Piazza Venezia, the well-tomb, a perfectly circular hole in the ground, lies just to the right of the senate house in the Forum of Caesar. This forum was the first to be built, carved out of a former saddle between the Quirinale and Capitoline hills in 46 BC, and is thus on top of the tomb, which is suspected to be the first trace of a whole yet undiscovered ancient necropolis in the area.
Speaking to reporters, a jubilant Eugenio La Rocca, head of the Rome council?s cultural heritage department, dated the tomb to somewhere between the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. ?It was a real surprise to find rich furnishings inside it,? he exclaimed. The findings included a funeral urn and eight hand-worked, patterned vases in terracotta. They contained tiny bronze miniatures of weapons, and elsewhere what seemed t o be the bones of a bird, placed there, La Rocca presumed, to accompany the deceased on his journey to the beyond, as was the custom. The riches were found after first rolling back the tomb?s cover, a weighty round slab of tufa, and then removing its seal, a container in the stylised shape of a hut, a model akin to real huts found much later on the Palatine Hill.
La Rocca and the director of the dig, Roberto Meneghini, both deduced that such a rich tomb must have been that of the head of a clan, a patriarch ruling over one of the scattered groups of families, or settlements, that had gathered around a fording point on the Tiber when the future Rome was still only a wild place of heavily wooded, isolated hills interspersed by tricky marshes."

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I was so excited to read about the effort to recreate the famous Alexander and Darius mosaic. It is one of my favorite mosaics and I would have loved to have seen it in situ in the House of the Faun when I was in Pompeii this Spring. I hope it won't be too many years before I get a chance to return to Pompeii and see both the original in the Archaeological Museum of Naples as well as this new one.

Alexander, Piece by Piece: "In 2003, a team of artists from the International Center for the Study and Teaching of Mosaic (CISIM) in Ravenna, Italy, made an ambitious proposal to the archaeological superintendent of Pompeii: create an exact copy of the Alexander Mosaic and install it in its original home. More than two years, 16,000 hours of work, and $216,000 later, the most famous mosaic to survive from the ancient Roman world once again adorns Pompeii's House of the Faun.

One of the iconic images of the great Macedonian leader, the mosaic depicts a confrontation between Alexander and the Persian king Darius in the fourth century B.C. Since 1843, the mosaic has hung on the wall of the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, safe from the feet of Pompeii's two million plus yearly visitors, as well as from the rain and sun that have damaged the whole site. So why bring Alexander back to Pompeii? The House of the Faun was once Pompeii's biggest and most impressive urban villa, filled with simple but elegant decorations designed to demonstrate the vast wealth of the house's owners. But today, although the sheer size of the house is still clear, the brightly colored paintings and mosaics, the gleaming marble and bronze statues, the fountains, and the hustle and bustle of a palatial villa are gone. Superintendent Pietro Giovanni Guzzo wants to change that. 'I want visitors to have the impression that they are entering the same luxurious house in which the ancient Pompeian owners lived before it was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.'"

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