The inicipit of a piece from the East Bay Express:

UC Berkeley classics professor Kim Shelton and her largely student crew are back from a summer spent excavating, researching, and conserving at Nemea, Greece.

Ever since the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology was founded within UCB’s Classics department six years ago, UCB has maintained the Nemea Archaeological Center on land that in ancient times held a temple to Zeus and a sports stadium — and to which Cal holds scientific rights .

“How thrilling it is to be ‘back from the trenches,'” wrote Shelton, NCCA’s director, in her first report after returning from another summer abroad.

“There were several points when we were certain that our planned efforts would be dashed by the global economic crisis and the resulting political and bureaucratic rollercoaster, not to mention striking Greek transportation workers.” But thanks to generous donors, avid volunteers, and cutting-edge equipment, “we had a great summer,” Shelton wrote.

“Excavation is a costly and time-consuming business. It is a good idea to find out as much as we can about ‘what’s down there’ without digging, so we can learn as much as possible about the site before we decide where to excavate. Subsurface, non- invasive investigation of the natural or man-made layers or features is thus an important weapon in our excavation armory. This summer, we made a geophysical (i.e., sub- surface) survey of much of the archaeological site.

“‘Remote sensing,’ as it is called, uses magnetometry and ground penetrating radar to provide data about what is ‘down there.’ In addition, a process called Electrical Resistivity Tomography is applied which produces a map of the stratigraphy of an area. …

“As a result of the survey, the area around the temple seems to have a number of features that may be of interest, especially to the south and southwest. East of the temple and the altar, the GPR identified strong reflections in a couple of areas that may be related to architectural remains. Very surprisingly, similar architectural features were identified under the site parking lot from a depth of about 70-80cm and extending to at least 180cm below the surface. The survey also discovered evidence of a possible road leading away from the Sanctuary to the east, but different from the road to the Stadium.”

Efforts continued to locate the site of an ancient hippodrome where horse-drawn chariots raced. [more … mostly about upkeep of the site]

via UCB Archeologists Hunt for Hippodrome | East Bay Express.

As presented by the two Vickies … a.k.a. ‘Team Viper’:

• Cleopatra: deathless art? Or postmortem porn? «.

[we’ve just added Vicki Leon’s blog to our blogroll as well …]

As often, of late, I’m a bit behind the news cycle, and one of the stories of the past week dealt with the misidenfication of remains of a ‘mysterious breed of horse’ at Pompeii which turned out to be a donkey. Here’s the coverage from Cambridge News:

An academic at Cambridge University has been left long-faced after discovering a mystery breed of Roman horse found at Pompeii was none other than a donkey.

Experts initially believed that they had unearthed a new, now-extinct breed of horse when they analysed DNA sequences from skeletons found at a house in the ancient Roman town in 2004.

But the idea fell at the first hurdle when scrutinised by Cambridge’s Susan Gurney, who is working with Peter Forster on horse genetics.

She realised there had been a mix-up in the lab, which resulted in horse DNA being combined with that of a donkey to create an artificial hybrid.

Mrs Gurney, from the university’s Institute of Continuing Education, said: “Looking at the research with hindsight, it’s possible to recognise two separate strands of horse and donkey DNA.

“In addition, the horse DNA that appears to have been inadvertently mixed in with the donkey’s genetic information is the same type as that found in another Herculaneum horse, which might be the source of the mistake.”

The original study six years ago analysed the skeletons of equids – animals in the horse family – that belonged to a rich Roman household in Pompeii.

All five were well preserved by the volcanic ash which covered the town and the nearby settlement of Herculaneum when Vesuvius erupted in AD79.

Mrs Gurney found that the first 177 nucleotides – molecules which form the structural units of a DNA sequence – match existing patterns for donkeys. The remaining 193 nucleotides match those of an existing breed of horse.

However, the research could still prove important. The Cambridge experts believe the newly-identified donkey may well be the first proof that the “Somali” ass lineage normally found in Italy dates back to at least Roman times.

• via Long-faced academic over Pompeii donkey | Cambridge News.

Scouring the archives of rogueclassicism, I can’t find that this received any press attention back in 2004, although I might have missed it. The abstract of the article in the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry is available online … the payfer article too, of course. If you’re interested, here’s the abstract for the article with the initial misidentification:

DNA extracted from the skeletons of five equids discovered in a Pompeii stable and of a horse found in Herculaneum was investigated. Amino acid racemization level was consistent with the presence of DNA. Post-mortem base modifications were excluded by sequencing a 146 bp fragment of the 16S rRNA mitochondrial gene. Sequencing of a 370 bp fragment of mitochondrial (mt)DNA control region allowed the construction of a phylogenetic tree that, along with sequencing of nuclear genes (epsilon globin, gamma interferon, and p53) fragments, gave us the possibility to address some questions puzzling archaeologists. What animals—donkeys, horses, or crossbreeds—were they? And, given they had been evidently assigned to one specific job, were they all akin or were they animals with different mitochondrial haplotypes? The conclusions provided by molecular analysis show that the Pompeii remains are those of horses and mules. Furthermore one of the equids (CAV5) seems to belong to a haplotype, which is either not yet documented in the GenBank or has since disappeared. As its characteristics closely recall those of donkeys, which is the out group chosen to construct the tree, that appears to have evolved within the Equidae family much earlier than horses, this assumption seems to be nearer the truth. J. Cell. Physiol. 199: 200–205, 2004© 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

 

See also:

• Pompeii horse is in fact an ass | BBC

• Scientists’ extinct horse find turns out to be a donkey | Mirror

• Identity of Pompeii’s mystery horse revealed | Physorg

A brief item from Standart which is kind of interesting from a naming-of-potential-markets point of view:

In Bulgaria there are 49,800 private collections of historical value which are not registered, Nikolay Solarov – prosecutor from the Supreme Cassation Prosecution Office announced at a seminar on prevention of traffic of cultural riches. Nikolay Solarov explained that only 200 collections are officially registered; less than 1% of the private collections in Bulgaria have ownership certificates.

Currently pieces of Bulgarian cultural heritage are smuggled mainly to Arabia Saudi and Japan. Smugglers carry Thracian treasures as some artifacts have been detected even in Australia.

Objects dated back from the Roman times unearthed in Bulgarian archeological sites are usually smuggled to Zurich, Munich or Vienna.

• via Illegal Collections in Bulgaria Number 49,800 – Standart.

… which reminded me … we haven’t heard about the Maecenas Foundation and/or the Miho Museum in a while …  the former seems to have appeared in Wikipedia in the last month or so, but still hasn’t updated its website in the past five years. The latter’s website is somewhat more current, but not really …

We’re used to seeing various personages in American culture compared to ancient Roman types … here’s a somewhat different one making the rounds (it appears) of the Australian press, FWIW and inter alia:

The late Professor Norberto Bobbio, one of Italy’s greatest postwar political thinkers, authors and legal philosophers, once described Silvio Berlusconi as the incarnation of the demagogue of ancient times: “Berlusconi, in essence, is the tyrant of the classics, the man who believes it licit to do what mere mortals only dream. The defining characteristic of the man-tyrant is the belief he ‘can’ everything.”

via Scandals never hurt Silvio, Italy’s everyman | Brisbane Times.