Rome's Subway Expansion Reveals Artifacts From The Ancient Past (npr.org) 42
All roads may lead to Rome, but once you get there, good luck taking the subway. The sprawling metropolis is expanding its mass transit system -- a sluggish process made even slower as workers keep running into buried ancient ruins. From a report: "I found some gold rings. I found glasswork laminated in gold depicting a Roman god, some amphoras," says Gilberto Pagani, a bulldozer operator at the Amba Aradam metro stop, currently under construction not far from the Colosseum. Pagani is part of an archaeological team at the site, a certified archaeological construction worker trained to excavate, preserve and build in cities like Rome, with thousands of years of civilization buried beneath the surface. The presence of ancient artifacts underground is a daunting challenge for urban developers. For archaeologists, it's the opportunity of a lifetime. "I think it's the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me, professionally speaking," says Simona Morretta, the state archaeologist in charge of the Amba Aradam site. "Because you never get the chance in a regular excavation to dig so deep. That's how we've found architectural complexes as important as this."
Re:Work arounds (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think everyone's treating this as a problem to be solved. Maybe not even most people. I'm sure a lot of people take it as a matter of national pride that they have so much advanced civilization buried beneath their feet and love that it is being preserved.
Re:Work arounds (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think everyone's treating this as a problem to be solved. Maybe not even most people. I'm sure a lot of people take it as a matter of national pride that they have so much advanced civilization buried beneath their feet and love that it is being preserved.
It's an opportunity more than a problem.
Most time when you build a tunnel for a subway all you get out of it is a big hole.
Rome is getting a bunch of ancient artifacts out of the deal, and all it costs them is a longer schedule and the associated costs.
Re:Work arounds (Score:4, Interesting)
I live in Rome.
It may be an opportunity.... but we have literally hundreds of thousands of similar opportunities all over the place. and while I agree that these are precious artefacts that ought to be studied and made available to the public to be seen, the truth is that there's no funding for that, and so they mostly get buried back to preserve them. This while the infrastructure works are delayed for decades, to nobody's advantage. I mean, it's Rome. There's bound to be Roman artefacts, since Romans have lived here for the past few thousands of years.
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No one is forced to live in a particular city. If one wants to live in the (gorgeous) open-air museum that Rome is, but cannot afford to live in the central part of the city, he must take into account that daily commuting will take a little longer than usual, because the subway network cannot be - and will never be - as dense as in other cities. Surely in San Francisco, Berlin or Tokyo you can commute faster, but you also cannot see the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain or Piazza di Spagna. Different people ha
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I live in Rome.
It may be an opportunity.... but we have literally hundreds of thousands of similar opportunities all over the place. and while I agree that these are precious artefacts that ought to be studied and made available to the public to be seen, the truth is that there's no funding for that, and so they mostly get buried back to preserve them. This while the infrastructure works are delayed for decades, to nobody's advantage. I mean, it's Rome. There's bound to be Roman artefacts, since Romans have lived here for the past few thousands of years.
Yeah, ideally the archaeologists would get some additional funding so they could help compensate for the increased construction costs though that doesn't really work politically.
Which reminds me, I was originally gonna write "priceless artifacts" in my original post but then I thought better of it, turns out with good reason [www.ebay.ca].
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It's almost harder to find a metro/subway/underground tunnel that didn't find interesting archaeology, provided that archaeologists were allowed in.
Just hope that your new subway project doesn't run into an old plague pit. [bbc.co.uk]
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It depends on the locals you ask to. Surely those who live in the suburbs and need daily commuting might be pissed off, but I can hardly imagine the wealthy people who live close to the Trevi Fountain complaining about public transportation, let alone preferring to level down the fountain itself to get a new subway station.
Rome wasn't built in a day (Score:5, Funny)
Hardly surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hardly surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd bet that in Rome you cannot dig anywhere without stumbling on some archaeological finding.
What was garbage, obsolete rubble, or misplaced trinkets millenia ago is now valuable information about lost or corrupted history.
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Not with the same frequency as in Rome. You can name one, two, maybe three archeological sites for every major city in the european continent. In Rome, you can basically name one per every street.
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It's like that in a lot of cities. I once went on one of Edinburgh's Ghost Tours". Mostly it was walking around what are technically the foundation levels of old buildings. But the architects had actually built up an entire level street over several valleys. So they had excavated the old topsoil and dug out hundreds of thousands of stone blocks to make arches, then built a road on top of what were now basement levels. This also helped to preserve old monuments like the original village road and well, which
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It's like that in a lot of cities.... Edinburgh... Paris...
Not really, not at the same massive frequency as in Rome. There can be more archeological findings in a single Roman square than in all of Paris and Edinburgh put together. That's really not the same thing.
Yeah, Cato the callow. Carthage Must be Destroyed (Score:2)
In about 2000 years archaeological robots will be digging through the ruins of a federal prison and they'll uncover Donald TRUMP's bones!
Yeah, yeah, Cato the Callow. And Carthage Must be Destroyed, too. Oh, wait: It WAS. By Rome, even.
No matter what your professors told you, it wasn't Cato the Elder's incessant injection of flamage of Carthage into discussions of unrelated subjects in his (the original) forum that did them in. It was their behavior the next time Rome and Carthage were having a military
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The battle of Carthage was a massacre.
Sure was.
What part of "... the Roman general going postal[k] on them." don't you get? I'd think it was clear even with the typo.
1. Lay siege to Carthage - intending to do the usual thing of annexing them and ending up with them as a new province, religious freedom and all.
2. The Carthaginians' priests declare that the people have angered their god and a sacrifice is needed to make the Romans go away.
3. The people are convinced and a sacrifice is made. Their god happen
This is actually (Score:4, Insightful)
Very, very cool.
This is a usual problem in Italy. (Score:2)
Especially historically significant places like Florence and ... well, just about everywhere. You can't uproot a weed without discovering some ancient piece of aqueduct or something. The Italians are pretty unnerved about this. The piazza de la signioria in Florence was dug up for a few years back in the early 90ies. Everyone was relieved when they finally closed it up again.
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The Italians are pretty unnerved about this.
I'm Italian, and I know no one being "unnerved" by our archeological treasures. It's actually something to be proud of, rather than a "problem". It's also profitable in the long term, thanks to tourism revenues. Maybe only construction companies are pissed off, because they thankfully cannot ruin the landscape and speculate as they would like to.
It's a matter of balance (Score:3)
You could destroy anything you find in the name of the future.
You could save anything you find in the name of the past.
Or you could find some balance in between in the name of the present.
This happens all the time in Europe (Score:2)
When I was in college, I did a semester abroad trip to Greece and Italy. One of the Greek guides explained that contractors dig up ruins all the time in Athens; it's impossible to dig a metro line without it happening. (Here's one example [alamy.com] of a metro line running right through ruins of Ancient Athens.)
The guide told us that Greek law requires that contractors notify the Ministry of Culture immediately when ruins are found. They then come out, inspect the site, and after a couple years, either give the con
What's it called? Monorail! (Score:2, Funny)
Clearly, Rome should never have built a subway in the first place. If they had built an above-ground monorail, this problem would not be happening. Plus, Rome would finally be put on the map just like Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook. Just think of the tourism dollars.
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Mobile phone adoption in Rome was fast (Score:2)
I heard, back in the late 90's when mobile phones were just becoming common place, that in Rome they were selling like hot cakes.
Trying to lay wiring in that city was the reason given.
Every time they stick a spade in the ground they find something ancient and all work stops while the archeologists move in.
So getting a new land line was tricky. Wireless provide to be the solution for the modern day Romans.
I would think the ancient sewers of Rome would mitigate some what the need to tunnel for wiring.
Not much
A good quote... (Score:4, Funny)