An Ostia Adventure

Today during lunch, I decided to wander over to a certain bathhouse, the Terme di Mitra, in the city with Bart. Why this bath complex of so many in the city? Well, it's rather interesting, for one reason, because it was converted into a church in the 4th/5th century.

Look! It's a bath that became a church.

Upon becoming a church--or I suppose, I should write upon the transformation from bath complex to church (although, honestly, Bart and I couldn't find any evidence that the baths stopped being used after this space became a church--the bathing facilities are in other rooms--but the archaeological site for Ostia says that the waterworks seem to have fallen out of use in the 4th century), the Christians of Ostia made some improvements to make it exceptionally church-like, installing an apsidal space behind the altar and adding traditional Christian iconography (the chi-rho and the alpha/omega)

Detail of apse

Christian iconography


But the really neat part about this bath complex--and its namesake--is a neat Mithraeum (eastern god worshiped across the Roman empire in the imperial era) located almost directly below the church.

Situated at the end of a long underground communal dining area is a grand statue of Mithras slaying a bull (the original is in the Ostia museum, this is a replica), bathed in the same type of light that it would have been during the height of Mithraism in the Roman Empire. Now it's probable that the Mithraeum was out of use by the time the space above it was converted into a church, but I can find no evidence that the statue was ever moved or that this area was blocked off. It makes one wonder about the relationship between Christianity and the mystery cult of Mithras in Ostia during the late antique era...

Anyhow, after wandering around the bath complex for 15 minutes speculating on usage changes based on brickwork (LMW has beaten that topic into both of our heads), we wandered down to the Baths of the Seven Sages, notable for its colorful latrine paintings of the traditional seven sages of antiquity imparting rather useful advice.

As an example, let's take a look at Solon of Athens. Above his head (once you zoom in), you'll see the Latin phrase VT BENE CACARET VENTREM PALPAVIT SOLON. For those of you lacking Latin (or even if you have had some, this language certainly does not show up in Wheelock!), it can be translated as "In order to shit well, Solon rubbed his belly." Seriously. One more?

In advice to the constipated, the painting reads DVRVM CACANTES MONVIT VT NITANT THALES, which can be translated as "Thales advised that those shitting with difficulty should strain." My favorite (which did not come out that well in a photo), is the one for Chilon (VISSIRE TACITE CHILON DOCVIT SVBDOLVS) "The cunning Chilon taught to fart silently"


Ah bathroom humor...just one way we can be united with the Romans.


(also, whenever I teach ut-clauses again, these are TOTALLY going to be examples)

Short post

At the end of a day spent digging through floors, I tend to return to my apartment rather dirty.

And smelly (I think).

Sweat mixes with dust that mixes with dirt that all coagulates with sunscreen (only one sunburn since I've been here!). And that all is one nasty mess.

Showers are nice to get rid of that but...the water heaters in Italy are small. Really small. As a result, it's probably a better idea to get in the shower closer to the front of the four guys who live here rather than at the end, unless an ice cold shower is preferred.

But eh, why should I complain? I'm in Rome! And it's the Fourth of July. Today calls for a break from pizza and pasta and veal and wine for dinner. Burgers and beer for all!

I'll take Rome over anywhere else

Not a whole lot to report about the goings-on at Ostia; we've started taking off the floor (time to break out the pickaxes and chisels), though we could not work today because it was raining at Ostia (nap time instead!). One of the benefits of having the day off was that I could come home and run (after a nice nap, of course...6 AM wakeup alarms are so overrated). I just love running in Rome. In all honesty, Rome is a pretty lousy place to run--the traffic is unpredictable, the air is full of exhaust, there are tourists everywhere, the surfaces are all concrete or cobblestones (clearly the way to get rid of all the cartilage in my knees before the age of 40...were I to live here full time).

Despite all this, I'd rather run here than anyplace else.

A little part of my preference goes back to the plethora of sights (it is pretty dang cool to be running along the Aurelian walls or along the Via Appia). But there's more than that.

I'm intoxicated by the rhythm of the city. There's no way around it...Rome is a living organism, millenia old, teeming with energy and vigor. Some people I know opt for the energy of a New York, or a Paris, or a London. Fine. Let them have their own city. Rome has claimed me for herself and I willingly submit.

When you find yourself in a hole...

Keep digging. Though not too far as you might go through the 1960s backfill and into the Severan-era (late-2nd century AD) sandfill.

This week we started to really open up the other half of our trench. To our happiness (and more to the point, to LMW's happiness), we found lots of floor in the new section. Intact floor means that we have a perfectly-preserved (or at least in theory) stratigraphy below the floor, which will allow us to better date the building stages of the synagogue complex. This is really cool because that's essentially the entire goal of the dig--settling on a precise dating for the various stages of its growth (not finding the Ark of the Covenant). There was, however, a chunk of the section that did not have a floor near the surface; this was stuff that was dug up by excavators in the 1960s and not well-documented. So Tony and I set about to dig. And dig. And dig. When we got a meter and a half down, LMW informed us that we had gone through the backfill and into the ancient sand. Not very cool, but whatever was in the Severan era sandfill was not going to tell us a lot about the chronology of the site because (a) we already know that it's from the Severan era and (b) it was not preserved under a "hard seal" like a floor.

Today we set about cleaning up the walls (I like the idea of cleaning dirt) so that we could get some nice pictures with the camera of what we do have. I was finishing up my cleaning (the trench is deep enough only for one person to work comfortably at a time) when I struck something hard. I wiped a corner off with my trowel and it didn't move. I carefully troweled off what I'd found and saw that I'd found a rather sizable chunk of serpentino marble...which was pretty cool

In the end, there wasn't much this marble could tell us--it was part of the fill which made it essentially ancient trash. Pretty trash, but still trash. But this excavation WAS able to give us a better look at the foundations and we puzzled over what they all meant this afternoon.

I'm including a labeled photo above (click to make things bigger!). So what we have is a pier that might or might not be bonded with the wall. We know that the wall is part of an opus mixtum a shell for the synagogue and we know that the pier is one of several running down the length of the room we're working in. When we dug down, we saw a crevice between the two which suggested that the two might have been separate construction builds. Moreover, under the foundation of the wall (a foundation done shutter-style...i.e. they built a small shell of wood to frame the concrete pour and then removed the wood when  dry) there is a recessed amount of concrete--a previous wall?

In the course of the afternoon, after probing and poking, we are pretty sure that the upper foundation joins with the pier foundation (which was made by digging a hole and pouring concrete directly into that) but that the shuttering would have been done somewhat later than the pier's foundation. As for the recessed portion? Probably a part of the main foundation; it's only like that because in the process of making the shuttered foundation, the builders would have dug a hole and then as the hole widened out at the top, they put in the shutters to control the width of the pour.

Ah archaeology. If it weren't so gritty and dirty, I might really enjoy it.

A few of my favorite things, part IV

Photo Bombing Tourists

I'm not going to have a photo for this one, but I'd like to take a moment to talk about one of my favorite things to do while running in my favorite city in the world--photo bombing photos of tourist, particularly large groups of tourists. If you've been to Rome, you'll recall the large groups of people, all wearing similar hats or the same type of shirt, following a tour guide with a flag sticking high in the air as if he/she were the guide equivalent to Mount Everest. These groups of people annoy me. They walk slowly and a large percentage of the time, the guide gets stuff wrong. Plus they all stop to take the typical photo of each famous place in the city. And so, as a runner, they often impede my progress as I try to make my way out and about on my daily run. I used to stop and let photos be taken but that is a process that does not end. Instead, I've discovered that it gives a perverse little thrill to think that when they go home and download their photos onto their computer, I'll be showing up as a blue-shirted blur racing through their image.

That makes me happy.

One week

So I'm done with one week of archaeologizing and I have a few general observations:

--First, it's a lot of work. Especially out in the Roman sun when we don't really get any shade. It gets hot out there and I have the most awesome tan lines where my watch normally sits. So much sweat and disgustingness at the end of the day.
--Secondly, it's a pain in the ass to make the commute in to the site everyday. 20 minutes waiting for the 719 (during which I enjoy a cappuccino...which I don't drink in the States but are fabulous at the Alari cafe next to the bus stop), 10 minutes on the 719  to the Pyramide train station for a 30 minute ride followed by a 20-25 minute walk through the entire site of Ostia to gather our equipment and transport it to the site. Add in a mile(ish) walk to lunch every day, I think I'm doing upwards of 7 miles of walking every day on top of the massive amounts of shoveling. Whew.
--And finally, today was a productive day in the trench; we opened the other half of the trench and found a LOT of floor barely under the topsoil. The reason floors (especially vast amounts of floor) are important to archaeologists is because when we remove the floor, it will provide undisturbed stratigraphic layers containing items that we can use to date the floor above it and thus allow us to have an idea about the development of the site. Speaking of stratigraphic elements, we found a coin in the trench today! A tiny little coin (probably a nummus from the 4th or 5th century) but a coin...although its location on the top of the floor (basically in soil  with which the previous excavators had covered over the exposed elements) means that it was not originally located there and useless for dating, but a coin is pretty exciting.

Look, a coin!

Another cool thing we found today--plaster from the walls. If you look closely, you can see that it continues past the floor level, which means that this level of floor was added later than the wall.




That's enough archaeology for the week...look back tomorrow for another one of my favorite things in Rome!

My Trench, or My Life Covered in Dirt

Archaeology is a dirty business.

I guess I've been training for this type of job since I was young, playing for hours upon hours in the sandbox. Essentially, doing archaeology is a grown-up version of playing in the sandbox. Only dirtier. And for many hours in the hot sun every day. This was the first week of excavations and I am in what we think was a former pantry/kitchen for the synagogue complex.

A view from the north entrance of my trench

We know it was partially excavated by Squarciapino in the 1960s but we did not know how much of it had been done. The first thing we did when we started working on the trench (there are three of us working in this location--Amanda, Tony, and I) was to take detailed and precise measurements of the area we were excavating (we started with the southern half...we open the northern part tomorrow) and to draw them out on a plan where we could mark various features of the locus (basically a level of dirt) that we were working on. And then we opened the trench. The first thing we had to do was remove the layer of topsoil and grass and within the first hour of removing the topsoil, I found a floor. Now floors are very fun things in archaeology because they mean that whatever is below the floor can be used to date that level of building (hopefully coins, but pottery works well too).

Floor!

We continued excavating around the floor and found further fun finds in pot shards. My first pot shards. That makes me a real archaeologist because all that archaeologists love are pot shards (a small exaggeration).

I'm a real archaeologist!

Anyhow, by the end of the first day, we had found a shelf of original flooring that was only 5 centimeters or so below the topsoil. When we came back the next day, we were quite excited to articulate (dig down into the backfill from the earlier excavation) the floor that we had found so that the floor would stand out in the photos LMW takes of various stages of the excavations for documentation purposes. 

The floor, articulated.

We came back today (Tony and I had been pressed into duty digging out an old trench after we took this picture...we moved 15 cubic meters of dirt in a couple hours) and started work on pulling out the rest of the Squarciapino backfill and we found some really awesome stuff--two more layers of floor which will hopefully allow us to date the early structure more precisely than we have. Plus we dug a pretty deep hole--and there's a hole within the hole that seems to be some sort of small cavern (perhaps we will find some ancient evil a la Indiana Jones?). So things are going really well with this trench and we're excited to see what else we'll find when we start digging down on the rest of the trench.

Our fearless trench supervisor shows just how deep the trench has gotten

Our trench at the end of the day. On the left you can see the top floor level. The next level down is another floor and at the bottom you can make out what seems to be a base floor. We’ll have to pickax through that to get a sense as to what’s underneath this entire structure.