Melvadius

I love the advice at the end 'Animal safety experts warned people to stay indoors and stay away from the crocodiles' as if they will have much choice in the midst of flooding

A sub-link from the third link you posted earlier on lists some (all?) of the major Romano-Greek wreck finds over the last century. Although very few of the short descriptions of the wrecks give any real indication of how large the remains found were or how large the original ship may have been but I get the impression that a wreck potentially 60m long is well into the upper limits of what has previously been found.

I suppose one question they may be toying with is IF it is a single wreck rather than two lying close together she is enormous for her day so could she possibly have been an early version of the ships which formed the grain fleet?

The provenance is there. IIRC this should give more details although probably not who has owned it since it was found.

This reminds me of wolfie Smith's response to needing an awfully long wall for all those who were going to be first against it - 'Don't worry we are going to use Hadrian's Wall'.

I suppose the sticking point is why he felt the need to break into an academic archive that is already available to bonafide academic researchers all be at a fixed price and with appropriate citation. It seems like something done in support of a plagarists charter than for any 'honourable' reason.

The other aspect to consider, so far as modern reenactment is concerned, is that depending on size of event when re-enactors are paid to put on a display they normally get given 3 or 4 slots throughout the day in which to present their display. This effectively means they have to represent a full battle in a relatively short period of time and often in between at least some of them have to be in costune presenting every day life in the period. You therefore cannot present a battle as it would have actually have been fought with short sharp periods of conflict followed by redressing of lines and preparation for the next round of fightimg/ replacement of dead and injured from the front line.

Well if you count my garden as 'average' when I dug a test pit in it a few years back there was a smattering of pottery sherds dating back to the 13/14th century....and half a chicken skeleton (I seem to remember the left half).

Of course it is - anyone who has seen a decent group of modern re-enactmentors is well aware of how mobile a shield wall can be. Of course there are exceptions - a certain major group are often cited by re-enactors I have known as tending to send slooooow moooootion shield walls against basically empty villages with only one or two women defending it with brooms

The fact that the bulk of Harold's army were the local fyrd is well known so I don't see that as a new revelation. However it does not negate the fact that Harold and his personal retinue had started their journey in the south wikth the local fyrd waitinfg for William's invasion had to rush north, raise the fyrd there, fight a hard battle then make a second forced march south from Stamford Bridge recalling the southern fyrd who had been dismissed when they went north. The situation for Harold's army would have been utterly confused many of the southern fyrd could not have been recalled in time, exhaustion would have played a part in the battle on Harold's side and possibly more to the point most of the fyrd were not professional soldiers and/or mercenaries as William's troops were.

So far as I can see there are no restrictions which I can amend which should stop any member posting on this thread I now suspect that it may be a restriction built into this particular forum by one of the Triumviri- possibly requiring them to release priviliges to individual members. Unfortunately I don't think that anything can therefore be done by any of the legati until Viggen comes back to resolve the issue himself. In the meastime if anyone has problems posting images here you may have to consider putting up a suitably anonymised image somewhere else where you do have access and putting a link to it instead.

I would go a bit farther and suggest that the vegetation looks like northern France or possibly more likely somewhere 'fairly' near the Rhine in Germany. I don't think that it is in the Netherlands but I may be wrong. I find it an interesting site in that the visible 'standing' masonry looks to be around 4-5 foot (1.2m - 1.5m) high.

I'm not sure what the problem may be since the forum permissions should allow images to be posted by eligible members - which I am sure you both are. When replying like the other fora on this site there are two options a 'fast reply' which only allows text input and a second option which is available as a tab within the 'fast reply' entry box to use the 'full editor' function. If you click on that button there is then an option to include attachments. You simply have to browse to where you have stored the image on your own PC that you wish to upload and then 'attach this file'. I can think of a couple of issues that could cause problems with doing this you have either exceeded your attachment allocation for the site as a whole or else the file size is too big (max of 4MB). It should say under the 'attach file' box what your current allowance is. If that is the case then the only option is to go back through some of your earlier posts and possibly gallery remove larger attachments to create more space for the new images and/ or make the image size smaller.

The architecture looks more French than anything else so if there were old mosques there could you possibly be counting Corsica, where there was a famous exile resident at one point, as separate from France? Alternatively I seem to remember another famous exile going to Greece.

There is also St Albans with a great Roman themed museum along with Roman remains - it only takes about 40 mins to an hour from London. Similarly Chelmsford is only 32 minutes away. Going the other way Oxford is about an hour away and the Ashmolean has 3 or 4 Roman relate galleries although its collection is much larger and somewhat idiocyncratically displayed since its major refurbishment. What you will have to consider is which station you can reach easily in London since that can add 30 or 40 minutes to your journey time depending where you are leaving from.

The BBC has now reported that nearly all of the new items found have been declared as 'treasure' (81 out of 91) since they are at least 300 years old and contain at least 10% precuious metal. The remaining 10 pieces are deemed "wastage"...but may still be of interest. The interesting aspect is that several of the new pieces fit pieces found in the original hoard so obviously are part of the original deposit and more work may reveal other matches extending our knowledge of how the orignial objects looked and were used.

USA Today have now picked up on this story - no major revelations prior to the talk apart from accurate surveying revealing that the wrecked ship was apparently twice as long as previously realised. They have also found more encrusted objects which need X-raying and subsequent conservation to see if they contain anything interesteing. It really is a case of keep watching this space for at least the next couple of years as work continues on the site and then the real revelations are liable to emerge as post-excavation and conservation work kicks in.

Ditto on the New Year felicitations and as our Scottish brethren would say Wishing you all had a great Hogmanay ..."wi'oot" a bad hangover.

If you go to the Guildhall to see the amphitheatre how about a quick look at the Temple of Mithrasa which is fairly nearby on Queen Victoria Street about half-way between Bank and Monument tube stations.

Wishing you many happy retunrsa and while I'm at it here's hoping you have a great New Year

Yes it is curtesy of the Bardo Museum in Tunisia.

Welcome to UNRV crbergerc we have a few ex-military members and others who have similar interests so you hopefully will find kindred spirits.

Rather than attempting to list the Top X number of events BBC has instead listed what they considered was exciting the archaeological world (or at least what peaked the interest of the representative from the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge who wrote the article) month by month throughout 2012 as Digging into 2012's archaeology

Sorry it has taken a while. I managed to loose my photo editing software along with crashing my hard drive and have only just relaoded it. To make up for the delay here is an easy one.

The BBC has made available a large archive of its In Our Time archive of radio discussions dating back to 1998. Although unclear if available to foreign browsers definately now available to those UK based. If you have not come across these before they are a series of 45 minute discussions on almost any topic dating from the relativly recent past into early historic period, several of these are Roman related. The format of each is for the presenter, Melvyn Bragg, to moderate a discussion of three guest experts. The most recent of which (27 Dec) was a discussion on a Roman related topic of the Mithraic cult, its origins in Persian beliefs and how it operated, eventually touching on its relations with early Christianity. The Mithraic episode should be available from tomorrow but to give an idea of the range and diversity of topics covered episodes in December 2012 included: