Berlusconi: the Mummy Returns

"Return of the Mummy": French daily Libération's snide comment on Silvio Berlusconi's return to Italian politics (after announcing his retirement at least 1000000 times). Not that he will win, but maybe there'll be some undead bunga-bunga.

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Stolen from Luca Pareschi's Facebook feed (Grazie, caro!)

Students occupy Colosseum, Tower of Pisa

This afternoon students protesting austerity plans for Italy's education system occupied iconic monuments around Italy, including the Colisseum and the leaning tower in Pisa.

Photo IGN

The proposed cuts of over €12 billion would reduce dramatically student stipends, research funds, cut course offerings, and cost 130,000 jobs. Protests gripped Rome, Florence, Bologna, Pisa, and many other cities. As jaded as I am about protests, I was gripped by the drama of occupying these ancient monuments. (Though the students' attempt to bum rush the Italian Senate chambers was good too.)

Photo ADN

Scuffles between cops and students broke out here in Rome, where I happen to be today to have Thanksgiving with some friends - we saw my student and researcher comrades on the march but were home to start on Thanksgiving dinner before the tear gas started smoking.

The "education reforms" proposed by the governments are a Trojan horse for privatization and slashing "unproductive" subjects like literature and the arts. The symbolic connection between the monuments of ancient culture and contemporary knowledge under threat is kind of forced, but it still works for me. Probably because I agree with the analysis on the Italian street - those who created the economic crisis took the world economic on a long speculative binge, and now that they're hung over they want the rest of us to pay their bar bill for them by sacrificing our futures. Hell with that.

Finally: a bunch of people made these effigies of classic books as shields for scuffling with the cops. Petronius' Satyricon as riot equipment? I think Encolpius would appreciate those priapic police batons.

Literature fights the man (Rainnews.it)

In which my archaeological optimism is fueled by DNA evidence

In the 'Asians everywhere department': recent DNA research found Siberians in Greenland and a man of east Asian decent in Italy.

Reuters reports that a skeleton found in northeast Greenland provides DNA evidence of a separate migration from Siberia into the New World Arctic around 5,500 years ago, unconnected to the ancestors of modern Inuit or other Native American groups. The man, dubbed 'Inuk' after the Greenlandic for 'man', was apparently balding and had a tendency toward dry earwax. The results are 'surprising' because they reveal a previously unknown migration from Siberia into the Americas.

Inuk's mugshot. Bummer about the dry earwax, man.

Another set of DNA from an Imperial estate in Vagnari, Italy (near Bari), uncovered a man with mitochondrial DNA suggesting an east Asian origin on his maternal side. Isotopes in his bones show that he was not born in Italy. Of course, the article immediately racializes him as an 'Asian man', though the genes could have come from a distant ancestor.

I have a couple reactions. First, DNA analysis is cool as hell and I want to read stuff like this all day. Second, why do they have to immediately go with the racial angle in the Roman case? I mean, is anyone surprised that the Roman Empire was a hodgepodge of cultures? A lot of people have this idea that Romans were 'white people' in some modern sense of the term, though that is total nonsense both on a genetic and cultural level - there were a lot of dark-skinned Romans, and the culture did not use the concept of 'race'. (See this nice article about how 'ethnic groups' don't exist from a genetic perspective.)

But more deeply, I get annoyed at how much everyone is 'surprised' by unusual archaeological findings. I'm what I call an "archaeological optimist". I think humans are capable of a lot, so I tend to assume that history is complex and full of amazing stories, travels, and discoveries that we just happen not to know about. You only need stupid theories like aliens building the pyramids if you think people are basically dumb, uncreative, and unambitious. As if we didn't thrive for a million years without electricity, fast foods, and teh internets and figure out a lot of hard stuff along the way.

Asians in Italy? Siberians in Greenland? Well, of course! The Romans had trade missions to China as early as the Han Dynasty, and Chinese travellers are attested to have made it at least as far as Syria in the Seleucid period. The cultures of the Siberian arctic, moreover, were the astronauts of antiquity, thriving in the harshest climate the planet has to offer and eventually peopling the Americas (much more impressive than Columbus' discovery, in my book.) The textual, DNA, and archaeological evidence represent only the tiniest fraction of human activities. So the question is not really 'did people in antiquity do some amazing travel stunts' but 'which ones'? (For a great list of theories to pick from, see here. I bet at least half of them are true.)

p.s. Another cool article, while I'm futzing around on Science Daily: Taiwan is apparently the legendary home island of the Polynesians, according to genetic evidence linking Polynesian and indigenous Taiwanese people. White folks really need to stop thinking of themselves as the only 'great explorers'.

Google Street View comes to Pompeii! Can we rebury it now?

The ruins of ancient Pompeii have hit Google Street View. This is the future of archaeology, folks: virtual walkthroughs of sites available anywhere, anytime, from anywhere in the world. It’s going to change things.

Check it out, it’s amazing.



Italy’s culture minister hopes this will boost tourism, but I hope something different: that Italy will do the politically inconvenient thing and rebury large portions of the old city. Yes, that’s right, I said it. We should record the whole city in 3D with high-resolution, multispectral imagery, then rebury most of Pompeii, with roofs over the rest.

Why? Because the remains of the ancient city are falling apart. And archaeology is destructive by nature. When you dig up a site – especially if you dig up walls made of anything but solid stone – what you find starts to deteriorate, immediately. The conservation situation at Pompeii is bad and getting worse.

It’s not for lack of expertise by the conservators – it’s just that no matter how much money you spend, walls without roofs and plaster on them are going to get damaged by exposure to the weather. The ‘pure’ thing, from the conservation perspective, is to avoid modern interventions at all costs. The only way to avoid roofing a site, and still conserve it, is reburial.

I can hear the howls already. I loved visiting the place myself. But 2.5 million visitors per year is unsustainable, and everybody knows it. If we want future generations to have anything to look at, something has to be done sooner rather than later.

My suggestion: start with street view. Add an ambient soundscape. Open it up to developers to create games and 3D reconstructions based on the archaeology of the city that people can enjoy on the interwebs. And then sell tickets to visit select areas of the site by lottery, with a drastically reduced number of visitors.

Sound harsh? Welcome to reality. If we're really thinking about conservation, we're planning for 1000 or 10,000 years. In most places, the only way to conserve a place for that long is reburial, with the occasional re-excavation as a special event. Technologies like street view are an incredible blessing for archaeology because they let excavators show off a permanent, 3D exhibition of their finds. And if you want to rebury the site, you can, while allowing the public to visit the spaces. If the recording is multi-spectral and high-resolution enough, you could do a lot of scholarship while the ruins sleep safely underground.

Vespasian Was Not Born in Kenya

In the midst of our heated debate about Barack Obama's birth certificate, Italian archaeologists have found what they claim is the birthplace of the emperor Vespasian:

The 2,000-year-old ruins were found about 80 miles (130 kilometers) northeast of Rome, near Cittareale, lead archaeologist Filippo Coarelli said. The 150,000-square-feet (14,000-square-meter) complex was at the center of an ancient village called Falacrine, Vespasian's hometown.

Even though there are no inscriptions to attribute it for sure, the villa's location and luxury make it likely it was Vespasian's birthplace, Coarelli said. "This is the only villa of this kind in the area where he most certainly was born," the archaeologist said in a telephone interview from Cittareale.

What's that you say? You'd like to see pages and pages of bad jokes about Vespasian and the Flavians? That's funny, me too!

Good thing there's a nice long thread on the subject over at fark.com. As Drew notes, it is reassuring to know that Vespasian was not born in Kenya.

My favorite comment/photo, from borg09:

"...the Flavians"

Clearly, the last of the dynasty.

Update: Mary Beard harshes Coarelli's mellow:

The talk among British and US archaeologists in Rome... is rueful. After all the 'advances' in archaeology, and what it can tell us about the ancient world, are we still looking for a 'Vespasian lived here' spot?

Berlusconi Exposes Himself

The ongoing Berlusconi sex saga took an archaeological twist lately when L'Espresso released tapes secretly recorded by escort Patrizia D'Addario at his villa on Sardinia.

Italian Prime Minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi is known for, well, uncovering himself to as many young women as possible. His Villa Certosa on Sardinia (which has his own artificial volcano!) has acquired a reputation as a party spot where politicians and businessmen cavort in the nude with would-be actresses and models.

The Villa Certosa, near Olbia (Daily Mail).

Messing with younger women is an age-old pastime of male politicians. Predictable, kind of boring even. The real bombshell in D'Addario's tapes comes after Berlusconi's finishes boasting about his staying power and moves on to bragging about the opulence of his villa. Beneath the artificial lake on his property, he claims, are 30 Phoenician tombs:

After noting that the lake is adorned by a fossilised whale, Berlusconi purportedly adds: "Underneath here, we found 30 Phoenician tombs from 300BC."

This was news to the archaeological community. And sensational news, too.

A necropolis under the estate near Porto Rotondo on the Costa Smeralda would be evidence of Phoenician settlement in an area where none were thought to have been situated. Italy's National Association of Archaeologists said it would be "of the utmost importance for the study of Phoenician expansion on the island".

Of more immediate concern was why, if such an obviously important discovery had been made during the excavation of the lake, the authorities were not notified. Government officials in nearby Olbia knew nothing about it. This is a serious matter. Failure to report an archaeological find within 24 hours is an offence in Italy punishable by up to 12 months in prison.

The opposition Democratic party, which had been looking for a way to embarrass the prime minister without getting immersed in his eventful sex life, was not slow to spot the opening. Representatives in both houses of parliament tabled questions, demanding that Berlusconi and his heritage minister give an explanation.

Naturally, his lawyer claims that there are no such tombs.


Phoenician urn burials at Sant'Antioco, Sardinia (h/t Wandering Italy)

Frankly, I think the Italians have their priorities straight. Berlusconi certainly seems like a tasteless man in his personal life, but his behavior is hardly criminal. But taking out a whole Phoenician cemetery? If the allegations are true, that's a crime for which I would love to see him serve some time.