Teenagers Stayed Overnight at Their School and Found Hidden Ancient Roman Ruins
smithsonianmag.comHaving lived in Italy for 7 years as a teen, the word is that construction of commercial, governmental, and private sites will be shut down for sometimes years so the Italian government and bureaucracy can have its go in deciding what action to take. A Roman era catacomb was found when my sister's school was being expanded, and the Nuns running the school managed to hush it up pretty well. I imagine they explained to the working crew their loss of a job if word got out..
It seems reasonable a similar thing happened here even as far back as the 1870s when the original construction was taking place.
Similar thing in Tunisia where if ruins are found, the government will own the site. Theoretically, it should compensate the owners for their loss, but practically they pay peanuts. So if people find ruins in their lands, they just hide it/throw it/bury it.
There is a phrase "Shoot, shovel, shutup" used in the US whenever anything is found on private property (usually endangered animals) that the government has an interest in protecting/restricting. The owners will destroy it immediately and before anyone finds out so that they don't lose their property rights. Thus you have the unintended consequences that these regulations accelerate rather than mitigate their destruction.
Fun fact: back in 1600s the Swedish government wanted to make our old history grander than perhaps it had been. As part of that they instituted a law that if you find gold or ancient things on your grounds you would be paid more than the worth of it if you brought it in: https://www.icomos.se/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/1666-Placat...
It lead to many treasures reaching museums etc instead of being melted down! It's still in effect, and still pays higher-than-melting prices: https://www.raa.se/kulturarv/arkeologi-fornlamningar-och-fyn...
There’s a reason Nordic countries do so well and are a real “first world”. They’re smart. In the good sense.
> As part of that they instituted a law that if you find gold or ancient things on your grounds you would be paid more than the worth of it if you brought it in
> It's still in effect, and still pays higher-than-melting prices
But the melting price of an ancient bronze sword is nothing. Most ancient artifacts have no material value.
Well that's not going to work on bigger animals (e.g. buffalo) as you can only carry back 100 lbs at per hunt.
The plan also fails miserably with elephants, giraffes, and rhinos.
In the Pacific Northwest the liberals delayed a $4.5 billion project for a bridge and HOV lanes (SR 520) due among other things to the Marbled Murrelet bird and a few owls. Not unexpectedly, that project took 30 years from conception to finish.
But at least they finished it. Of the original San Francisco-to-Los Angeles high-speed rail system, Newsom has spent $14.8B over the past 18 years and it has zero operational miles of fast train.
There is a high probability that Elon will be reporting that from Mars to make a point LOL
That's why all civilizations need to proactively obliterate any durable structures and artifacts they create on a regular basis. Destroy everything in that sweet spot where it's old junk that no one cares about' nothing should survive long enough to become valuable due to its antiquity.
If you don't leave anything behind, future generations can just build without caution, because the past will forever be shrouded in mystery. Let's not repeat ancient civilizations' mistakes.
> To William’s complete lack of surprise, the little cellar under the shed was much better built than the shed itself. But then, practically everywhere in Ankh-Morpork had cellars that were once the first or even second or third floors of ancient buildings, built at the time of one of the city’s empires when men thought that the future was going to last for ever. And then the river had flooded and brought mud with it, and walls had gone higher and, now, what Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork. People said that anyone with a good sense of direction and a pickaxe could cross the city underground by simply knocking holes in walls.
For a modern example, see the Raising of Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago. I think I've seen an image of what the old ground level looks like now, and / or that you can take tours there. There's probably loads of stuff buried there now.
Edit: Actually it was Seattle, you can still visit its old ground level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
My understanding of the Chicago case is that most of what the old "ground level" was is just sewers today. I heard some of it was railroad tracks and maybe some are still used for cargo-only trains, but most of Chicago wasn't really raised a full "floor" with enough headroom for interesting underground spaces.
A US city often overlooked for some intricate people explorable underground spaces is Cincinnati: https://www.visitcincy.com/blog/post/unmistakably-cincinnati...
Some of Cincinnati's underground exists from plans to build subway trains that never completed. I think that makes Cincinnati's particularly sad being that it constitutes a perpetually unfinished public works/public transportation project.
Relatedly to that, Atlanta also has a tiny underground leftover from passenger train lines that ended passenger travel decades ago (and so was turned into a mall, because America): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Atlanta
In Italy, almost anywhere you can find roman artifacts. They're just in the layer underneath the WW2 bombs.
It's truly amazing. In Rome, you can find ruins of all historical periods, all the way up to early 2020s!
As an American, where we have comparatively little history (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!) visiting Rome is almost mind blowing to see SO MUCH ancient history right there, and almost everywhere. So cool!
Comparatively few historical ruins built out of materials that would have lasted this long, but a long history, actually, and some you can still see...
Mexico City is a quick plane ride from the USA, and while some of their ruins are buried, you can hop a short bus ride outside the city to walk among standing ruins of Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.
I've been on the Great Wall of China and all over the world and Teotihuacan was fascinating for me to see. Even more intriguing, no one knows who built it. Aztecs discovered it many centuries after it was abandoned and forever wondered about its origin.
Nitpick but we do know who built Teotihuacan -- it was the Teotihuacanos! Unfortunately it's true that we know relatively little about them.
We know who robbed the bank, it was clearly the bank robbers!
Archeology is my fav.
It was a carefully planned large city with the road along the main axis pointed at 15 degrees east of north, and the large pyramids were integrated into the city's design, but we definitely don't know who did that planning. Hundreds of apartment compounds were standardized. Tens of cubic meters of earth were moved and they had to quarry lots of basalt and other stone.
There is strong evidence it was a multi-ethnic city, especially since there are distinct ethnic neighborhoods based on artifacts such as pottery. No trace of writing or how the city and government were organized, and whether a ruling elite called the shots or if there were ruling families from different ethnic groups working together.
This feels kind of tautological. We know who built Teotihuacan, it was the Teotihuacanos! What do we know about them? Well, they built Teotihuacan...
(Seriously, though, _is_ anything much known about them beyond that?)
> Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.
...so what? Why would you compare "the size of Teotihuacan" to "the area enclosed in the Aurelian Walls"? Why not compare it to "the size of Rome"?
I can think of one reason you'd do this...
There are older structures and artifacts than 250 years, they're just not European in origin. Like Cahokia Mounds in Illinois: https://cahokiamounds.org/
Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.
Also if one expands it to the Americas more broadly it goes back pretty far. Earlier this year on a trip to Central America I stayed in a home that dated to the mid-16th century. Still not as impressive as what Europe has, but was neat!
I've been to Cahokia, and look forward to revisiting it in future decades since only 10% has been excavated so far!
Same!
Narwala Gabarnmang says hi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung
44,000 years of continuous human occupation. (Except for a brief period during the 20th century ..)
Those are very cool. Worth a visit if you’re ever in the St Louis, Missouri area.
A few years ago I made a graphic showing the years before present dates of some of the earliest archaeological sites across the Americas for Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_the_Clovis_Fir...
> (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!)
We used to smoke weed on the roman wall behind my friend’s high school. Very popular hangout spot. Lots of people using it for rock climbing practice (you’re not far off the ground and can climb laterally for hundreds of meters).
The local castle, about 1000 years old, is a popular makeout spot for teens.
Stuff built long time ago still serves its purpose - the people.
Anyway yes we have some comparatively old stuff here, you get used to it quickly. Colleague lives in cca 400 years old house, nothing special. Just more building restrictions, not because its somehow protected but simply due to meter-thick stone walls and corresponding architecture, statics and so on. One couldn't tell if its 100 years old or 400 from outside. After renovation even less (it was a farm house before, so french state doesn't feel the urge to interfere with his property).
250 years is longer than the existence of a country called Italy, let alone the Italian Republic. Just like in Italy, the history of people in your area did not start with the founding of your country.
Really? My history class taught me that before the Europeans arrived there were only the native americans, so nothing of historical value.
I had always thought I didn't like history. It was just so incredibly boring.
Later in life, I found out why. It's not that I didn't like history, I just don't like the sanitized version taught to me in primary/secondary school. It's like corporate public relations where they vaguely acknowledge wrongdoing, but communicate in a very weaselly way to downplay it.
The rote response I hear from the USA fandom is always some variation of "WELL THEM INDIANS DID BAD THINGS TOO" and it's like... ok? Then why obfuscate? If everyone is equally bad or whatever weird thing you're trying to say, why not just lay out all the cards and let me decide for myself how to interpret the history?
Unfortunately, the American Indians did not have writing, and so the histories of the tribes is pretty murky.
For example, most of what is known about the Commanches comes from letters and diaries of white people who were in contact with them, or were enslaved by them.
See "Empire of the Summer Moon" by Gwynne.
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
It's a fantastic account, and I'm amazed nobody has made an epic miniseries about it.
"Writing" is a tricky term. Indigenous groups in what's now the US had property records, laws, and symbolically represented stories that could be read by others. What they didn't have was a system of symbols that can fully encode human speech (and vice versa). The latter is the typical definition of "writing" and it's not required to have the former.
On an unrelated note, Gwynne's book is fine as a fantasy story, but it's very badly regarded from the perspective of narrative history. Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire is a much better book arguing a largely similar position. Don't take that as applying to later books by the same author, sadly.
I ordered the book, thank you!
As evidence of the paucity of historical knowledge of the Indian peoples, estimates of the pre-Columbian population vary from 10 million to 100 million.
I know about the various rock paintings with symbols, but there isn't enough of that to represent much of anything.
The adobe structures of the American southwest, and mounds in many other areas survived, but for the most part there was not much left of historical value in terms of ruins of structures of the native americans. Europeans more often build with stones, rock, brick, etc and more regularly other more survivable building materials.
You might have missed the sarcasm
Europeans are the descendants of the third little pig?
some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!
TBF, so do some folks in the U. S.; though in most cases, just barely.
we have some omega ancient history here in america like possibly 13,000-16,000+ year old history, we just don't have structures that stood the test of time mostly stone crafted tools and hunting weapons and such. but first peoples history goes way back mindblowingly far
I was in Pompeii just 2 weeks ago, the thing that absolutely blew my mind was that there is a section where archeologists are working _right now_ still uncovering more buildings, and you can see them exactly as they are coming out of the ground - I think with the rest of the ruins I've had this feeling that you know, it got somehow cleaned up and repaired a bit for tourists, but nope, you can see in that section of active excavation works that these 2000 years old structures are really coming out of the dirt with the frescoes and mosaics still intact.
And then we went to Paestum, which is an even older Greek settlement in Italy - with the original Greek temples still standing. Mindblowing, and I'm used to old stuff being around(a friend of mine lives in a house where a portion of it is a listed structure dating to the 12th century, it's just a bathroom and a storage room for them lol).
The crazy thing is that Pompeii's art was so well preserved by the ash but now it is exposed to the elements and will degrade.
There's almost no original art in Pompeii, it's all in the archeological museum in Naples. There are some reproductions in place in Pompeii, but mostly it's bare brick walls that the art has been scraped from. You need to see the brick walls, then see the art in the museum, then compose the two in your head.
Yes, it will still degrade in the museum, is all I mean.
some folks in USA have houses older than that too
Early settlement of Europeans into present-day USA started in earnest in the early 1600s.
There must be a metaphor somewhere in this, when somehow it is the angry youth that discovers something of value hidden in plain view that no one bothered to look at before !
I visited Rome last year. There was a lot of talk about how long it was taking to build a new subway line, because they kept running into ancient artifacts. It was also commonly said that the city was like a lasagna, with layers upon layers of history under everything. Building that were originally built elevated are now at street level.
It almost seems hard not to find ancient ruins. It then becomes a question of priorities and resource allocation.
If they're so common, why not incorporate into the construction project?
Walk through a modern subway, see bits & pieces of ancient history all over the place. Buy icecream, sit on a bench that labourers hacked out of stone 2ky ago.
> If they're so common, why not incorporate into the construction project?
If it's the same one I read about, they did.
Because it's more expensive and takes longer (which then makes it even more expensive).
Which is why ancient ruins in construction sites are often covered up, unreported, or even destroyed.
I visited Athens in 2006 shortly after the Olympics were held there and the city had been refreshed. The Syntagma Square subway station did exactly this, with layers of archaeology revealed behind glass as you descended the stairs. It was magnificent!
They do do that? https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260408-a-150-metro-tick...
That's actually done a lot in ruin-heavy cities. For instance, here's a Lidl with bonus underfloor Viking village in Dublin: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/aungier-street-lidl-arch...
Reminds me that story about the beach table in Bulgaria, that turned out to be a 1,700-year-old Roman tomb: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article2...
I mean, it's the rest of the subway line thats the problem -- how many ancient sites do you tunnel through to reach the next stop?
I thought the buildings getting lower was just the ground compressing. The foundation is solid, but the ground underneath still compresses. There are circumstances like Seattle where they literally built up the city, but those are less common
No. The ground does not usually significantly compress under those loads. Remember for much of human history buildings are build with wood and non vitrified bricks that readily break back-down into mud/gravel/organic matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(archaeology)
My obvious thought is why not dig deeper to build the subways?
There was graffiti as well so others had already found it
In my tuscanian city the university is building a new building for the engineering department. While digging they randomly found an ancient etruscan well. In this case everything went smoothly and timely and it will be preserved, an underground parking near the center had ww2 remains and deeper than that, archeological ones that slowed down the whole thing
Did the ruins come alive at night with like Roman soldiers and stuff running around, etc?
Surprised that Smithsonian magazine makes such an awful website. Every minute, new ads are loaded, shifting the text up and down, making it hard to read.
had you ever been to rome? totally normal.. there is an entire hill made of roman pottery waste.. is a public park! best city ever
Dang, all I found was a used condom when I did this.
This has Magic School Bus episode written all over it.
Whose first instinct is it, when finding an ancient roman villa hidden underneath your school, to smear graffiti on the walls. I cannot relate.
It seems that the students who actually reported the ruins may not have been the ones who graffiti'd it. They supposedly heard from other students who'd discovered it before. Whether or not that's true is harder to say.
> Covid-19, the teenagers occupied their school, spending several nights camped out in the building
So instead of keeping lockdown, they killed bunch of innocent people just to have a party! What sort of person would do that!?
At that time we had military trucks in Italy hauling dead bodies, because regular services could not keep up with all the corpses!
Are you okay? They were teenagers. We were all there and we all tried. The logistics of having 7 billion people quarantine while international flights and asymptomatic carriers carried on made it _impossible_ to not play out like it did
~5 years above two comments would have had totally flipped karma/flagging
In January 2021, the date from the article, it was a totally different scenario from early in the pandemic in Northern Italy. Calling these students murderers is a little histrionic at best.
COVID kills people even today! And we had no vaccinations in January 2021.
I did not say they were "murderers", manslaughter is different. More like driving car drunk because you just do not give a shit!