WHAT HAVE THE ROMANS EVER DONE FOR US?
IT MAY SEEM IRREVERENT TO QUOTE MONTY PYTHON AS A chapter title in an archaeology book, but we’ve already invoked Indiana Jones more than once, and—in any event—the answer that was promptly given in the 1979 movie Life of Brian was concise and reasonably accurate: “sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health.” Although the Romans may not have invented all of these things, they certainly spread them throughout a large part of the Roman Empire during the centuries of its existence, especially during the first century BCE through the fifth century CE. They also brought us large-scale entertainment and arenas such as the Roman Colosseum in which to watch them.
Archaeologists have found and excavated Roman ruins not only in Italy, of course, but also in England, France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere in Europe, as well as Libya, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East, not to mention Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. In 1986, for instance, I was part of a team excavating a Roman villa in Paphos, Cyprus. The villa, which dated to the late second or early third century CE, had been destroyed, apparently during an earthquake. The artifacts that we found attested that it must have belonged to a well-to-do owner. We found the skeleton of what was probably a young girl killed during this event, along with a single leather sandal, in one of the rooms.
The most impressive feature in the house was an intricate and colorful floor mosaic in one room, which depicted Orpheus—a legendary Greek hero known for his musical skills—playing the lyre and surrounded by animals. It has now given its name to the whole house (the House of Orpheus). Our work excavating the mosaic sticks in my mind especially because of the difficulties involved in getting an overhead picture of the entire mosaic once we had finished revealing it, since it was almost ten feet wide and twelve feet long (three by three and a half meters). Because those were the days before drones, or even low-flying kites, were used regularly, our photographer had to climb a ladder and then walk out on a wooden plank that we had attached to the topmost rung, like a gymnast on a balance beam, while we held on to the entire contraption, so that he could be directly above the mosaic and get the desired overhead photographs. Picture yourself on a diving board at a swimming pool, standing on the very end and bouncing on it above the water, but holding a very expensive camera and taking photographs instead of diving in, and you’ll get some idea of what it was like for him.
Finds like this villa and mosaic in Cyprus have been discovered everywhere that the Romans established themselves, or where Roman influence was felt, from Europe to the Middle East and beyond. We have already mentioned in earlier chapters Roman-period discoveries in London and at Troy, as well as Athens, Delphi, Pompeii, and Herculaneum. Later in this book we will have additional opportunities on several occasions to comment on the Roman finds at sites such as Masada, Megiddo, and the Dead Sea Caves in Israel, as well as Petra and Palmyra in Jordan and Syria. In this chapter, therefore, we will limit ourselves to a discussion of a few major monuments in Rome itself and muse on some of the problems involved when archaeology is used for nationalistic purposes.
According to tradition, the twins Romulus and Remus founded Rome on April 21, 753 BCE. They were said to be descended from Aeneas, the prince who fled from the burning city of Troy five hundred years earlier, as it was being sacked by the victorious Greeks at the end of the Trojan War sometime around 1250 BCE or a bit thereafter. The Roman poet Virgil tells us Aeneas’s story in the aptly named Aeneid, which was written in the first century CE during the age of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. Virgil also mentions the twins several times (in books 1 and 8).
It is perhaps not surprising that the story of Aeneas is a bit suspect, since Virgil was trying to create a national epic for the Romans as Homer had earlier done for the Greeks with his Iliad and Odyssey. The story of Romulus and Remus also is highly suspect. We find the full details in the first book of Livy’s History of Rome, which was also written during the reign of Augustus and can be seen as part of the same movement to glorify and legitimate Rome’s first emperor. Livy said that the twins were abandoned at birth by the Tiber River but were found by a she-wolf who took them back to her lair and raised them as if they were her own pups. Later, a shepherd named Faustulus discovered them, brought them home to his wife, and raised them as his own children. Years afterward, while they were in the process of founding the city, Romulus killed Remus and named the city after himself, or so the legend goes.
Livy’s volumes cover Rome’s history from its founding to his time. Much of what he says has been corroborated by archaeologists, including the discovery of primitive huts and other remains from the early first millennium BCE on the Palatine Hill in Rome. The story of Romulus and Remus that he relates, however, is a fairly typical rendition of what scholars call a foundation myth, which societies often use to explain how apparently ordinary individuals became rulers or leaders. We see similar tales told about Moses in the Hebrew Bible, as well as about Cyrus the Great of Persia and, much earlier, Sargon of Akkad, who ruled in Mesopotamia during the twenty-third century BCE. All relate events that are open to question.
Livy was not the only person who was enamored of Rome’s history and who desired to trace a direct line from antiquity to the present, of course, be it the first century or the nineteenth and twentieth centuries CE. In fact, the archaeological excavations done in Rome during much of the period from 1870 to 1940, and the present state of many of the reconstructed ancient monuments, were undertaken in large part because of a desire to link past and present.
Pope Pius VII initiated a program of excavation and renovation in Rome, beginning in 1803–1804. Work was done to uncover and conserve parts of the Arch of Septimius Severus, the Pantheon, the Arch of Constantine, and the Colosseum. These efforts continued even after Napoleon’s conquest of Rome in 1807, with further work in a number of areas, including Trajan’s Forum and the interior of the Colosseum.
Work with a nationalistic agenda began in the years after 1870 by order of King Victor Emmanuel II, when the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, as well as a number of other ancient buildings and monuments and some famous sculptures, were either further excavated or simply cleared of rubble. Rome had recently become the capital of a unified Italy, just as it had once been the seat of the Roman Empire, and the king wanted the architecture, both ancient and modern, to reflect its newly reacquired status.
Beyond that, much of what tourists see today was first uncovered by order of Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy who came to power as prime minister in 1922 and who, ten years later, declared, “I . . . am Roman above all.” In fact, the very word fascism, which Mussolini coined in 1919 to describe his political movement, comes from the Roman fasces, which were the bundles of wooden rods with an axhead protruding at one end that were carried around in antiquity to symbolize the power and authority of the Roman magistrates. As a visual representation of his revolution, of Rome’s importance in the past and now the present, and of his vision of himself as a new Augustus, Mussolini adopted the image of the fasces as the symbol of his movement, after conferring with an archaeologist to get the image as accurate as possible. When he came to power, Mussolini was intent on re-creating Rome as it had been during the time of Augustus, when that emperor transformed what had been a city of brick into a city of marble.
In order to achieve this, Mussolini ordered that many of the ancient buildings should be excavated and that the various shacks, shops, and other modern or medieval buildings encroaching upon them be torn down. In this manner, under the supervision of an archaeologist named Corrado Ricci and others during the period from 1924 to 1938, the various additional forums—such as those of Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Trajan—were cleared, as was the Circus Maximus where horse and chariot races had been run. Ancient buildings and monuments were excavated, or further excavated in the case of the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, and some were reconstructed, such as the Ara Pacis—or Altar of Peace—of Augustus, as well as the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Theater of Marcellus, the Pantheon, and various temples. New squares and wide streets, which showcased the newly excavated monuments, also were built. It has been said that the excavations conducted under Mussolini during those fourteen years “added more to our knowledge of Augustan Rome than the previous fourteen centuries had provided.”
Mussolini took an active interest in these excavation and construction projects, even posing for a picture swinging a pickax as the demolition of encroaching buildings first began. In other photographs, he is shown with his entourage in front of the Theater of Marcellus on the new Via del Mare (“Avenue of the Sea”) and striding though the Piazza Bocca della Verità with the Arch of Janus in the background. Among the most famous is the photograph in which he is riding his horse in full regalia with the Colosseum in the immediate background, during the inauguration of the new Via del Imperio (the “Imperial Way”) after its completion in 1932.
The excavation of the Ara Pacis was particularly ingenious. The altar was originally begun in 13 BCE and finished in 9 BCE in order to celebrate Augustus’s return after three years of fighting in Spain and Gaul (modern France) and the peace that he had brought to the empire. It was a gorgeous piece of work, freestanding and about ten meters square, with sculptured friezes and relief panels on all four sides, including a personification of the goddess Roma herself, sitting on a pile of armor, and a depiction of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. Mussolini decided that he wanted it excavated and restored in time for a celebration of the two-thousandth anniversary of Augustus’s birth, which was to be held on September 23, 1938.
Ten pieces of the altar had been found accidentally as early as 1568, during the construction of the Palazzo Peretti (later renamed the Palazzo Fiano), with seventeen more fragments recovered in 1859. The latter were scattered in various museums and needed to be retrieved. In addition, the main part of the monument was still below the palace, both underground and underwater—excavations in 1903 had uncovered another fifty-three pieces from the altar but had confirmed that the area was completely flooded.
An archaeologist named Giuseppe Moretti and a hydraulic engineer named Giovanni Rodio led the excavation, in 1937 and 1938. The team first stabilized and reinforced the walls of the palace that were above the ancient monument by injecting liquid concrete into the individual bricks. They then built a huge sawhorse, on which the palace walls could rest, and used hydraulic jacks to lift them up onto the supports. Next, they dug a five-foot-wide trench around the entire area, ending up with a giant circle about two hundred thirty feet around and seventy-five feet across. They placed a pipe into this trench and attached to it fifty-five additional pipes, each 3 inches in diameter, and pushed them into the ground to a depth of twenty-four feet. By pumping carbon dioxide under pressure into the pipes, they were able to create a huge underground refrigerator and freeze solid all the moisture in the earth surrounding each pipe, thereby creating a circular wall of frozen earth twenty-four feet deep and two hundred thirty feet around. This served as a barrier prohibiting any more water from getting in. After pumping out the water that was already present within the area they had isolated, the archaeologists were able to excavate the remains, recovering seventy-five additional large pieces from the altar and hundreds of smaller fragments. They then reconstructed the altar, in a new location near the Mausoleum of Augustus, by combining these new pieces with those that had been recovered earlier and retrieved from the various museums. They finished just in time for the anniversary celebration of Augustus’s birth, as Mussolini had wished.
The altar and the area around it have since been renovated, with the most recent version being unveiled in 2006. In addition, several scholars have now called the reconstruction by Mussolini’s archaeologists into question, suggesting that it was done hastily and not entirely accurately, with some pieces left out, others improperly joined, and the outer portion potentially being a later addition by Tiberius, the emperor who succeeded Augustus and who may have redone the original structure.
Apart from the Ara Pacis, however, the most famous monuments that most tourists visiting Rome see today date from slightly later in the first century CE and the first half of the second century CE, during the time of the Flavian Dynasty and the period of the Five Good Emperors, respectively. These include the Colosseum built by Vespasian and the arch built by his son Titus, as well as the column built by Trajan and the Pantheon completed by Hadrian.
It was more than eighty years after the construction of Augustus’s Ara Pacis that the emperor Vespasian built his own Temple to Peace—the Templum Pacis—in Rome. Commissioned in 71 CE and officially dedicated four years later, it was reportedly ten times as large as the Ara Pacis. It was lost until relatively recently, but archaeologists conducting excavations from 1998 to 2000 uncovered the western corner of the temple, near the Forum of Nerva.
The most famous part of this temple was a much later addition, built sometime between 203 and 211 CE specifically to hold a huge map of Rome inscribed on huge marble slabs, which was attached to the southeastern wall of the temple. Measuring more than fifty feet high and forty feet wide (eighteen meters by thirteen meters), it is known as the Forma Urbis Romae, or, more colloquially, the Severan Marble Plan. It depicted the location of all the major buildings in the city that were present in the early third century CE within an area stretching from the Tiber River all the way to south of the Colosseum, at a scale of about 1:240. It was torn down, and the pieces reused elsewhere in Rome, during the barbarian invasions in the tumultuous fifth century CE. More than a thousand pieces of the map have been found by accident or by archaeologists since 1562, most recently in 2006, but it is still only about 20 percent complete (and only 10 percent of the pieces can be securely placed).
Vespasian had come to the throne as the fourth emperor in a single year, during the aptly named Year of the Four Emperors in 69 CE. At the time, the Roman Empire was engaged in putting down a rebellion in what is now modern Israel—the First Jewish Rebellion, which lasted from 66 CE to 70 CE. Vespasian had been the Roman general in command of suppressing the revolt, leading the Roman troops against the rebels until he was recalled to Rome and installed as emperor. His accession to the throne marked the beginning of the Flavian Dynasty, for his two sons, Titus and then Domitian, succeeded Vespasian. In all, they ruled from 69 to 96 CE, one following the other as emperor.
Because Vespasian had been recalled to Rome, it was actually his son Titus who captured and destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE. Herod’s Temple was burned to the ground and its treasures seized. So many people were enslaved and so much booty was taken as spoils that both the price of slaves and the worth of gold dropped substantially immediately afterward—the ancient historian Josephus says, “in Syria a pound weight of gold was sold for half its former value.”
Vespasian’s Temple of Peace was constructed in large part to celebrate the successful suppression of the First Jewish Revolt, and it was paid for with the spoils taken during the sack of Jerusalem. Within the temple were placed the looted treasures from Herod’s Temple after they had been paraded through the streets of Rome, including the solid gold seven-branched menorah, the Table of Shewbread, and a pair of silver trumpets, according to Josephus. All the items disappeared later, reportedly taken to Carthage during one of the barbarian conquests of Rome in the fifth century CE, possibly at the same time as the huge map was torn down, and subsequently to Constantinople in the sixth century CE. None has ever been found. They are, however, famously depicted on the monumental Arch of Titus, which commemorated the victory over Judea and which was set up and dedicated shortly after Titus’s death in 81 CE, at one end of the Roman Forum, near the Colosseum.
The arch was fortuitously preserved because it was incorporated into a fortified tower during the Middle Ages, as part of a fortress built by the Frangipani family, a powerful clan who briefly governed Rome in the twelfth century CE. By 1821, the arch had been freed from the Frangipani additions and restored to its original appearance. It is an impressive monument, towering over the thousands of tourists who now visit the Forum each year. When it was first constructed, it must have been a remarkable sight.
The scene in which these treasures are depicted being carried by Roman soldiers through the streets of Rome, which is on one of the interior faces that would have been visible to people walking or riding through the arch, was the subject of an interesting experiment in June 2012. A team led by Steven Fine of Yeshiva University in New York, Bernard Frischer of the University of Virginia, and Cinzia Conti of the Soprintendenze Speciale per I Beni Archeologici di Roma utilized a new cutting-edge technique to determine whether the scene had originally been painted, since it is now clear that many architectural features on ancient buildings—such as the Parthenon in Athens and the Temple of Luxor in Egypt, as well as many ancient marble sculptures—were once emblazoned with a profusion of colors.
Arch of Titus
Close-up, Arch of Titus
The Arch of Titus Digital Restoration Project, as it is known, began by conducting high-resolution three-dimensional scans so that the team can eventually create a three-dimensional model of the entire arch as it originally looked. The model will become part of Rome Reborn, a project headed by Frischer, which aims to recreate in three dimensions all of ancient Rome as it looked over time, from 1000 BCE to 500 CE.
The team also employed a noninvasive technique known as UV-VIS spectrometry to determine whether any part of the marble relief had been painted, without having to damage or destroy any part of it. They scanned for the remains of pigment in thirty-two locations, with positive results at twenty of those places. The results were analyzed by Dr. Heinrich Piening, a senior conservator from Germany, who reported that there were “traces of yellow ochre” applied “as a paint layer . . . directly to the stone surface” on one arm and the front of the base of the menorah being carried by one of the soldiers. From a distance, the depiction of the menorah would have appeared golden, as indeed it was in real life. Clearly other parts of the scene were painted as well, but the team has not yet done any work beyond this initial pilot study.
The medieval Frangipani clan also owned, and fortified, the nearby Colosseum, which Vespasian began in 72 CE and which was dedicated, still unfinished, by his son Titus in 80 CE. The original name for this arena was the Flavian Amphitheater, hence the occasional contemporary references to it as simply “the amphitheater.” We know, however, that at least by the eighth century it was also called the Colosseum, as it is still known today, possibly because of a huge statue of Nero that once stood nearby, fully 120 feet tall, or perhaps simply because it was indeed colossal—the tallest building in the city, as more than one scholar has remarked.
Vespasian built the amphitheater on top of the remains of a drained artificial lake that had been part of Nero’s Golden House (the Domus Aurea). It was a huge palace named for its golden walls, for some of the rooms and possibly the façade were faced with gold leaf. Renowned for the constant dinner parties and feasts that Nero held there, it was built after the Great Fire of 64 CE, of which it is said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned” (though other sources claim that he actually sang of the sack of Troy while watching the burning fire from a high tower located a safe distance away).
After Nero’s suicide just four years later, in 68 CE, the Golden House was abandoned, with portions demolished and covered over by later emperors. It was found by accident as early as 1488, during the Renaissance, when portions of it were reportedly looted for sculptures, perhaps including the famous Laocoön in the Vatican, which may have been found in a room of the palace decorated with scenes from the Trojan War. Raphael, Michelangelo, and other Renaissance painters “lowered themselves on ropes through holes in the ceiling to study the palace’s frescoes” and were reportedly influenced in their own art by these ancient wall paintings; a number of them even left their names inscribed on the walls. Modern archaeologists began excavating the remains of this great palace in 1907, with finds coming to light as recently as 2009, and it is now open to tourists.
It has recently been argued, fairly convincingly, that construction of the Colosseum, arguably today the most famous ancient building in all of Rome, may also have been funded by the sudden wealth acquired because of the Roman capture and sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE, just as was Vespasian’s Temple of Peace discussed above. Evidence for this comes from an otherwise unassuming piece of marble first seen near the Colosseum in 1813. It has long been known for an inscription upon it dating to the fifth century CE, but it appears to have been hiding, or harboring, an additional ghost inscription.
Professor Géza Alföldy of Heidelberg University made this remarkable discovery in 1995, which was suggested by observations that other scholars had made a few years earlier. The inscription carved into the marble records some restoration work that was done in 443–444 CE, which was paid for by a senator named Rufius Caecina Felix Lampadius. Apparently, this generous Roman had “restored anew at his own expense the arena of the amphitheater together with the podium and platform and rear doors,” according to the carved inscription.
Alföldy noticed, however, that a number of holes were drilled into that same face, which had nothing to do with Rufius Lampadius’s generous project. He believed that the holes were the remnants of an earlier inscription made of bronze letters that had once adorned the same piece of marble. They had been removed either before or during the carving of the later inscription. Each bronze letter would have had small pegs or protrusions on its back, which were inserted into the holes in the marble face in order to hold the letter in place. All Alföldy had to do was to figure out which letters would best fit the pattern of holes that were left.
Alföldy is one of the world’s experts in deciphering such ghost inscriptions, and it didn’t take him long to come up with a suggestion. He believed that it had read “The Emperor Caesar Vespasian Augustus ordered the new amphitheater to be made from the (proceeds from the sale of the) booty.” Vespasian would have set up such an inscription in 79 CE. The reference to proceeds from the sale of the booty used specific words that meant spoils captured in war. The only war that Vespasian participated in that would have yielded such amounts was the First Jewish Revolt, from 66–70 CE. Alföldy thus suggested that Vespasian used these proceeds to help underwrite the construction costs of the Colosseum, which most scholars now agree is probably correct. But Alföldy wasn’t yet done.
He noticed there were still a few holes left unaccounted for, even with this lengthy inscription. In particular, he noticed that the holes seemed to indicate that the original letters in one area had been shifted to the right and an additional letter added in. He determined that this letter was a T, which was often used as an abbreviation for Titus in such inscriptions, and that it had been inserted before the C of Caesar. Thus, the altered inscription read, “The Emperor Titus Caesar Vespasian Augustus ordered the new amphitheater to be made from the (proceeds from the sale of the) booty.” With the addition of a single letter, Titus—who had been the one to actually capture Jerusalem—claimed the construction of the amphitheater for himself. Such an alteration would have been done in 80 CE, after Vespasian’s death, at the time that Titus dedicated the amphitheater.
After its dedication by Titus in 80 CE, just one year after Mount Vesuvius had erupted and covered over Pompeii and Herculaneum, the Colosseum remained a centerpiece of Roman life until the last games were held nearly four hundred years later, in the fifth century CE. The spectacles and entertainments that were held there during those centuries ranged from the notorious gladiator fights to combats involving wild beasts and perhaps even, upon occasion, a naval battle (though naval battles may have taken place here only in the first years of its existence).
Just as the accidental discovery of the Golden House had reportedly influenced Renaissance painters, so too did the Colosseum influence eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic poets and other writers, including Lord Byron, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain. In 1817, for example, in the dramatic poem Manfred, Lord Byron famously had his main character describe the Colosseum in the moonlight:
I stood within the Coliseum’s wall
Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome.
The trees which grew along the broken arches
Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars
Shone through the rents of ruin . . .
. . . the gladiators’ bloody Circus stands,
As a result of Byron’s poem and the writings of the other authors, the Colosseum became a featured tourist attraction, especially for moonlight visits, and remains so to this day (though it is no longer open at night). I think, however, that we would be hard pressed to really and truly imagine the actual scene back in the day, even having seen Russell Crowe and the movie Gladiator, because even that would not cover all five senses.
Think of the smells clamoring for priority in your nostrils, from sweat to blood to the stench of fifty thousand unwashed bodies packed into the amphitheater; taste the dust in your mouth, stirred up into the air from the action in the arena; imagine the deafening roar of the crowd, so loud that you can’t hear the person next to you; feel the people on either side, packed in so close together that your arms and legs are touching for their entire lengths. You try to ignore the heat of the sun that is beating down on your head and shoulders, despite the large awnings strung up to protect the spectators, while gazing in fascination at the gladiators, the condemned criminals, and the wild beasts imported from Africa and beyond, fighting to the death for your amusement, one after the other, for days on end.
Sensory overload kicks in almost immediately, though, and you become one with the crowd, part of a seething mass focused on the arena below. You turn your head for a split second, and when you look again, a lion is springing toward a hapless zebra, both coming seemingly out of nowhere, but actually brought up from the depths below the arena by an ingenious system that mimics a modern elevator or dumbwaiter, carrying the animals upward to a level just below a trap door that opens and allows them into the arena.
This is what you would have smelled, seen, heard, tasted, and felt when Titus inaugurated the Colosseum with one hundred straight days of such entertainment. Later emperors held them for even longer—Trajan held games that lasted for 123 days and involved ten thousand gladiators and eleven thousand wild animals. But private citizens, vying for prestige in the eyes of their fellow citizens, sponsored most events, so that such spectacles were often a weekly, and sometimes even daily, occurrence.
Although it is debated whether anyone was ever actually thrown to the lions because of their religious beliefs, Pope Benedict XIV declared the Colosseum a shrine to Christian martyrs in 1749. Until then it had been used as a quarry for robbing out the cut stones to be reused in nearby buildings and for the iron clamps that held the stones together, which is why so much of it is now gone.
Of course, Rome was not the only city in the empire with an amphitheater; similar structures were built elsewhere, either by the Romans themselves or by the locals, especially during the first through fourth centuries CE. In fact, there are more than two hundred Roman amphitheaters that can still be seen in countries stretching from Albania to Algeria and Tunisia to Turkey, including nearly forty in France alone. Even today we still use amphitheaters with a similar plan for major sporting events, such as the Coliseum in Los Angeles, although usually the only gladiatorial combats waged there now are between rival football teams.
Nationalism—which by definition includes pride in one’s country and, frequently, its past—lay behind the tremendous emphasis on archaeology in Rome during the years of King Victor Emmanuel II and of Mussolini between 1870 and 1940. The connection is worth noting, especially since the link between archaeology and nationalism in Rome is possibly greater than in any other city or region in the world at any other time—including Athens, Jerusalem, Mexico City, and elsewhere. As archaeologist James Packer has said, “For the Fascists, the most important monuments . . . were [used as] . . . tools of propaganda, at once the precedents and justifications for empire.”
Unfortunately, one of the great ironies about the rush to excavate the monuments of ancient Rome by both King Victor Emmanuel II and Mussolini is that it resulted in tremendous destruction and demolition of large areas of the city where they wanted to conduct the archaeological work. Large numbers of people had to be moved, businesses were closed, and even churches were adversely affected.
Moreover, the haste in which the teams worked, and the laser focus on the remains from the time of Julius Caesar through the high point of the Roman Empire in the second century CE, also meant that the archaeologists dug through and destroyed the later levels and stratigraphy that covered these monuments, including those of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, that is, after the fall of Rome. Most of the objects from these later periods were simply thrown away and many of the rare archaeological notes and plans that were sometimes made in passing were subsequently lost during World War II. There was no attempt at asking and answering key research questions, which is basic to archaeology today—no desire to learn more about the people who had constructed the buildings, attended the games in the Colosseum, and worshipped in the temples.
The link between archaeology and nationalism is not unique to Italy; a recent edited book on nationalism and archaeology in Europe has stated that “it can be seen as a generalized phenomenon, affecting each and every country over the past 200 years.” In fact, as the editors point out, it was actually the appearance of nationalism in Germany, Italy, Denmark, and elsewhere that created and institutionalized archaeology as a science, complete with museums in which to store the retrieved artifacts, academic societies for the professionals, journals in which to publish the results of excavations, and university professorships to help teach students about their own recovered history. It also helped cement a belief—crucial to the success of archaeology and still prevalent today—that “the past . . . is of central importance to the present.”
Today this importance can be especially seen in the thousands of tourists who visit Rome each year to see the monuments that were unearthed in part as a result of what is sometimes now called fascist archaeology. To the question posed by Monty Python at the beginning of this chapter, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” it would be appropriate to now add tourism to the list.
The connection between nationalism and archaeology also has a dark side, as when the past has been invoked for more than just pride but to support the superiority of one modern group over others, as was seen in both Germany and Italy before and during World War II. It can also be used, and abused, when a modern group wishes to establish a claim to territory using archaeological remains—we see this, for example, in Israel, where both Israelis and Palestinians have claimed their right to the same land on the basis of real or purported links to antiquity. We will revisit this topic in a later chapter, when discussing Yigael Yadin’s excavation and interpretation of the archaeological remains at Masada. There is thus a concerted effort among archaeologists today to avoid being unduly influenced by nationalism or other similar sentiments, though that may not always be possible, since we archaeologists are human too, even if we are often excavating in countries other than our own.
