Melvadius

News from Poland is carrying a report that Polish archaeologist believe they may have discovered evidence for a Roman fort near Balaclava/ Balaklava in the Crimea. The report indicates that so far they have found some evidence for an apparent barracks rather than more extensive evidence for a fort although mention of several spacious rooms may equally suggest either officers quarters or a command building but hopefully more evidence will be found in the future.

Many happy returns of the day - hope you have an enjoyable one

Ostia without a doubt is worth a visit. If you cannot find the time to get there then you may be able to see it from the air if you are flying into Leonardo da Vinci/ Fiumicino airport as Ostia Antica is only about 2 km to the south of the airport.

Dito on that; have a great double celebration

I agree the archaeology there is really stunning although I am not certain that I would be happy trying to excavate in temperatures which can rise well above 80 Degrees Farenheit. There are a few issues with the excavation technique shown in the picture, e.g. in the UK we would have to shore the sides of the trenches if we went that deep. Mind you having read the article I can well understand the appeal of such an interesting site and it definately will be added to my list of places I would like to work given half a chance if only I can get past the language barrier

An interesting article in Past Horizons about ongoing excavations at a fortified settlement in the Crimea. The settlement, which shows a long influence of Greek culture, was heavily fortified and appears to have been nearly destroyed during the Bosporon/Roman war of 44-45 AD but then continued for another four centuries in relative peace.

All the best of the Season and have a Happy Birthday

I'm pretty sure that although, in common with all important Roman laws or regulations, they would have originally been carved/ cast in bronze the Twelve Tables have not survived in their original form or indeed in any way complete except possibly by inference. However the remains of a large marble map of Rome was discovered in precisely this way and your source may have accidently conflated mixed up) the two facts. Full details of the marble map are available at Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project while detailed discussion of the Twelve Tables from a late 19th Century book is on the Lacus Curtius site under Lex Duodecim Tabularum.

Checking through my Roman related cookery books although I do not have the Latin English text of Apicius by Flower and Rosenblaum (1958) The Roman Cookery Book I do have a couple of books which include a few references to

The BBC is carrying an article on the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon settlement during archaeological work in advance of a new open-cast mine on the Blagdon Estate, near Cramlington. N.B. Anglo-Saxon sites are notoriously difficulty to find due to mainly comprising a few post-holes and low-fired pottery which is often described as 'biscuity' in composition and which usually crumbles away before it can be analysed which makes the discovery even more important as is its rarity in that part of Northumberland. There are also a few more details of the find, including the involvement of local county archaeologists, on the Northumberland County Council website here Neither site gives any details of the sunken floored buildings which were found but I do wonder if they may be grubenh

I've noticed that there are several sites on the Web which seem to have a standard practice of including totally unrelated article links within all of their stories so on that basis the NYT linking to their other PNAS related articles isn't amongst the worst of the offenders. As far as the PNAS site is concerned I went in again using the above link and didn't encounter any problems in the short time I was connected so it may have simply been a localised 'brown out' effect. I did pick up another link which appears to be the main research article on the PNAS site here, which hopefully won't prove as difficult to read on-line.

Very lucky you were to have such a good view of the eclipse. Here you had to be in the far Northwest or North to have any chance of seeing anything at 7.41am - the rest of us were under a thick blanket of cloud and had to make do with remote images on TV

Kosmo, The link in the posting above to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) just seems to be a generic link to New York Times articles about the PNAS rather than providing more information on the research announcement. In case anyone is interested; the abstract of the original article along with the supporting material from the appendix which is freely available online through the PNAS open access option can be found here

With a quick search I found that Richard C Carrier has apparently extracted several relevant quotations by Seneca and others in his article Cultural History of the Lunar and Solar Eclipse in the Early Roman Empire so it would seem worth reading for answers to this topic.

BBC news are carrying a report about a Spanish stolen art haul being found after some of it was apparently offered to scrapyard. The fun thing here is at the end of the article where a police spokesman admits that initially they thought that it may have been an 'inside' job but are now reconsidering after part of the thieves haul, a piece of modern sculpture apparently worth 800,000 euros (

Ditto on that have a good one

Thanks for sorting the lack of citation issue out GoC. BTW is it worth mentioning that citations 3 and 4 for 'fruitcake history' in the same article seem to be locked in edit mode? 2nd BTW I found a website dating from 2004 which seems to contain similar claims to the original Wikipedia article referenced from a couple of other sites so well may have been used as the Wikipedia source but unfortunately again without citation http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Cakes/Fruitcake.htm

I'd partially back up Ghost of Clayton on this one as the OS map has been around for years and already lists the major town sites, industries, villas etc. I have a couple of versions the one from the 70's is still my favourite for its clarity even though many more sites and corrected details appear in later iterations. The real issue I have is in version 5 IIRC the Roman layers are underlaid with modern conurbation and road systems which can make it more than a little confusing. That said a variation of the OS map may prove useful if you could remove the modern layers and simply show the stages in the occupation of Britain ie by year so and so Kent and this much of Southern England probably occupied, by year such and such a line along the Foss occupied etc, with different lines for the later divisions of the Province. The sites of major battles is more problematical given some of the most interesting ie the probable sites of the final battle in the Boudican Revolt and Mons Grupius are still hotly debated with no viable resolution yet in sight. The confusing problem as the Atlas of Roman Britain graphically shows by the number of images used in it is how much or rather limited detail can be clearly shown in a single map.

However, it doesn't cite a source. I think that I would go further in saying that it does not cite any 'appropriate' source as the opening paragraph of the Wikidefinition states: Wikipedia cites the above definitions of fruitcake as from Dictionary.com but if you follow the link none of the definiitons mentioned appear there so it is anyone's guess where they actually come from.

I need to check my reference books but it sounds like someone may have been browsing Apicus again...

Possibly although my own inclination from their list is the non-destructive radio-carbon dating process. If this is proven and a repeatable process then it has a very wide range of applications while removing the need for deep core drilling of artefacts which has had to occur up to now.

It's that time of year when various magazines and TV companies with nothing better to do try to point up the top 10 stories of the year. With Archeology magazines list of their choice of top ten discoveries of the year I can see several with more than a little merit to the claim. However, I am much less convinced by National Geographics' ten most viewed stories.

One problem with any popularist programme about Pompeii is they tend to conflate both Pompeii and Herculaneum even before the discovery of something like 300 actual skeletons in the cliffside boathouses at Herculaneum suddenly provided something ever so slightly visceral that they could use on TV rather than the rather bland and somewhat homogenous 19th Century plaster casts from Pompeii. The recent programme by Mary Beard discussed elsewhere falls slightly into the same TV limbo by using the Pompeii name rather than the much less well know Oplontis where the new batch of skeletons were found. Most of the more detailed books on the area do make the distinction of where different groups of skeletons were found and obviously the more recent the better. As a case in point I do have at least one book in my library which because of when it was written states that only one skeleton had been found in Herculaneum of someone presumably crippled and lying in a bed. This skeleton was actually found close to the ceiling of one of the buildings because 'mud' had swept in and lifted everything up to the top of the room as it filled with debris. However it does point up the TV producers mentality of why mention one lone skeleton or several ancient casts when you can have lots of brand new 'real' bodies to pan lingeringly across during your next iteration of what really happened at Pompeii - just don't mention where they were actually found

I do not know if you can access this from elsewhere but the full programme is currently available on BBC i-player until 9:59PM Tue, 21 Dec 2010 (I presume GMT but it doesn't explicity state this).