Following Odysseus Not the end of the world Amarna city of light ...

inthenewsLost Roman town resurfacesHaving lain dormant for 1,500 years, thetown of Interamna Lirenas, 50 miles southof Rome, has been rediscovered and ischanging scholars’ view of the nature ofRoman colonial settlements.Long known about from the writings ofthe Roman historian Livy and the Greekgeographer Strabo, Interamna Lirenas hadalways been seen as a quiet town of littleconsequence, which followed the standardtemplate of urban development. But therecent work of a collaborative projectinvolving Cambridge University, the BritishSchool at Rome, the British Academy andthe Italian State Archaeological Service hasshed more light on this supposed backwater.The exact location of the town, in theLiri Valley in Southern Lazio, was gleanedfrom ancient sources. The fact that it wasstill unexcavated, and was thought tohave developed relatively little during theImperial Roman era, made the town anideal candidate to accurately reflectoriginal colonial settlement features.Led by Martin Millett, LaurenceProfessor of Classical Archaeology atCambridge and Fellow of FitzwilliamCollege, and Dr Alessandro Launaro,Postdoctoral Fellow at the British Academyand Fellow of Darwin College, the teamknew that a full-scale excavation of thesite, which covers more than 25 hectares,would be impractical, so they started withgeophysical mapping.By using a combination of scientifictechniques – ground-penetrating radar andmagnetometry – the team began to buildup a picture of the original street plan, andspecific features came to the fore.The greatest surprise was the appearanceof a building with radially arranged wallsand tiered seats within, which soonrevealed itself to be a Roman theatre.This suddenly changed the perceptionof this town as a small settlement.With its dominant temple and forum,Interamna Lirenas distinguishes itselfconsiderably from nearby Fregellae,which is also on the Via Latina – theprincipal road leading south-east out ofRome – and which was previously thoughtto be a comparable colonial town.Millett explained the significance of thefind: it challenges the formerly held viewthat Rome projected a certain image ofitself by building all colonial towns to apattern, and hence organising what thecommunities’ priorities would be, a viewthis discovery now challenges.There are hopes that excavation maybegin again in earnest in summer 2013,starting with the northern corner, whichincorporates the theatre and the forum,this would hopefully allow the precisedating of these structures. The local mayorhopes to turn what is know an unassumingstretch of farmland into an archaeologicalpark in the future.Geoff LowsleyDental detritus reveals useful factsThe idea of picking throughsomeone else’s dental detrituswould fill most of us withhorror, but it is by doing exactlythis that Christina Warriner,of the Centre for EvolutionaryMedicine at the Universityof Zurich, is gleaning valuableinformation about the livesof Iranian miners who died2,000 years ago.Archaeological geneticistsstudy some of the more unusualelements of the material remainsof our ancestors to gain aninsight into the past. Fromanimal, plant and bacterialremains to human tissue, boneand teeth, all the biomoleculesleft in what was once livingcan pass down a vast amountof information about thesurrounding environment.Warriner explained howmillions of threads of DNAbelonging to bacteria thatinhabited the mouth and throatare captured in dental calculus(commonly called plaque).Extracting and examiningthese DNA threads should‘allow us to investigate thelong-term evolutionary historyof human health and disease,right down to the genetic codeof individual pathogens, and itshould allow us to reconstruct adetailed picture of the dynamicinterplay between diet, infectionand immunity that occurredthousands of years ago’.Her particular area of interestis the mummies of miners fromthe salt mines of Chehr Abad,in north-west Iran, dating fromthe 4th century BC to the 4thcentury AD. The bodies of menwere naturally preserved bydesiccation when the salt minescollapsed. Unlike Egyptianmummies, they did not havetheir organs removed and,incredibly, some of the tissueis still intact.The aim of her project is tofind evidence for an inheritedgenetic trait, a deficiency inthe enzyme G6PD (glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase),which causes anaemia, aparticularly common conditionin modern-day Iran.It has been postulated thatmany of today’s digestivedisorders may be precipitatedby modern food-productiontechniques causing an imbalancein the bacteria within the gut.It is possible that identifying thebacteria carried by our ancestorscould help to determine what isa healthy balance.This type of study need not belimited to digestive conditions,however. Warriner explains:‘Diseases and disorders such asperiodontitis, heart disease,allergies and diabetes all have anevolutionary component relatedto the fact that we live in adifferent environment to the onein which our bodies evolved.’So we may also learn valuablelessons that can help in modernmedical treatment.While dentists tell us to brushour teeth regularly, we arefortunate that those before uswere not schooled in dentalhygiene, as we now have thisinvaluable archaeologicalrecord written in their plaque.Geoff LowsleyChristina Warriner examines amandible showing dental calculusand ante-mortem tooth loss in aDNA clean labcourtesy of Christina Warinner4