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"Bronze Age Pompeii" Discovered

Posted by Hemos on from the learning-mroe dept.

FortKnox writes "Italian archaeologists that were selling rights to build an underground parking lot, north of Pompeii, have discovered an ancient village within it. This discovery is a village that is basically a snapshot of the bronze age. The city, which is north of Vesuvius, was given the name "Nola". One odd thing, though, unlike Pompeii, they haven't found bodies in Nola. Good stuff to find, and a good place to compare theory with proof."

5 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Amazing stuff by dinotrac · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Natural time capsules like Pompeii, Herculaneum, the "ice man", Peruvian mountain mummies fascinate the Hell out of me because they give a hint of the life that was lived by those using the things left behind.

    This discovery seems especially interesting because reconstructing bronze age villages has been the province of experimental archaeologists like the late Dr. Peter Reynolds. It should be good to have more data to compare their reconstructions with.

  2. Re:That's fast magma! by zama · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you dig the ruins in Italy, you should try Turkey. Italy went through a long and intense phase of recycling where the materials of ancient buildings were nicked to build new ones. While Turkey certainly wasn't exempt from that, the profusion of well-preserved ruins is astounding. I've heard Algeria also has swaths of only lightly cannabilized ruins but I haven't verified that yet.

    Sigh... A sense of continuity and antiquity is one of the things lacking in America that I truly miss (Native Americans excepted).

  3. Re:Yeah, a Great Find... by Debillitatus · · Score: 3, Interesting
    In this day and age it wouldn't surprise me if a company was more irritated at a find like this than anything else

    True... but what do you mean, "this day and age"? I think this would have always been true. Essentially, this is why so few of Imperial Roman buildings still exist in Rome; the subsequent Romans were always ripping them down for building materials (common), destroying them because they were pagan images (less common), or ripping them down so they could build something new (perhaps least common).

    But, either way, a developer isn't going to be happy to find this. This is one thing we rarely have to deal with in the US, but it's pretty common in Europe, and, say, Israel. I don't know about the other parts of the Middle East, but I imagine most of the Arab governments have other things to worry about than archaeology.

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    Come on, give it up, that's

  4. Re:That's fast magma! by Boiling_point_ · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ... A sense of continuity and antiquity is one of the things lacking in America that I truly miss (Native Americans excepted).
    I'm Australian so we have the same "problem". Although, I think you've made a subtle distinction between indigenous culture and others that I find interesting. Do Italians, etc. feel a sense of connection with their ancestors and their environment in the way that Native American people do?

    Can we not feel a sense of "antiquity" without needing a cultural "continuity"?

    A few suburbs from me, a tens-of-thousands-of-years-old bora ring was recently rediscovered. The same culture that created that site still exists today - although I am not indigenous, I can't help but feel awe at the fact that I live so close to a cultural relic of a truly geological timescale that still has contemporary significance.

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    "If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
  5. Re:What's the fuzz about? by jmauro · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The little village is a few thousand years older than the rest of the city.