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Rome's Subway Expansion Reveals Artifacts From The Ancient Past (npr.org)
All roads may lead to Rome, but once you get there, good luck taking the subway. The sprawling metropolis is expanding its mass transit system -- a sluggish process made even slower as workers keep running into buried ancient ruins. From a report: "I found some gold rings. I found glasswork laminated in gold depicting a Roman god, some amphoras," says Gilberto Pagani, a bulldozer operator at the Amba Aradam metro stop, currently under construction not far from the Colosseum. Pagani is part of an archaeological team at the site, a certified archaeological construction worker trained to excavate, preserve and build in cities like Rome, with thousands of years of civilization buried beneath the surface. The presence of ancient artifacts underground is a daunting challenge for urban developers. For archaeologists, it's the opportunity of a lifetime. "I think it's the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me, professionally speaking," says Simona Morretta, the state archaeologist in charge of the Amba Aradam site. "Because you never get the chance in a regular excavation to dig so deep. That's how we've found architectural complexes as important as this."
And now we have the proof.
I don't think everyone's treating this as a problem to be solved. Maybe not even most people. I'm sure a lot of people take it as a matter of national pride that they have so much advanced civilization buried beneath their feet and love that it is being preserved.
I'd bet that in Rome you cannot dig anywhere without stumbling on some archaeological finding.
In about 2000 years archaeological robots will be digging through the ruins of a federal prison and they'll uncover Donald TRUMP's bones!
Yeah, yeah, Cato the Callow. And Carthage Must be Destroyed, too. Oh, wait: It WAS. By Rome, even.
No matter what your professors told you, it wasn't Cato the Elder's incessant injection of flamage of Carthage into discussions of unrelated subjects in his (the original) forum that did them in. It was their behavior the next time Rome and Carthage were having a military-grade spat, which made the Roman general go postalk on them.
But please DO keep being even more annoying than your historical model. It makes both you, and everyone on your side, look deranged, and hurts your cause. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't think everyone's treating this as a problem to be solved. Maybe not even most people. I'm sure a lot of people take it as a matter of national pride that they have so much advanced civilization buried beneath their feet and love that it is being preserved.
It's an opportunity more than a problem.
Most time when you build a tunnel for a subway all you get out of it is a big hole.
Rome is getting a bunch of ancient artifacts out of the deal, and all it costs them is a longer schedule and the associated costs.
I stole this Sig
Very, very cool.
#DeleteChrome
Especially historically significant places like Florence and ... well, just about everywhere. You can't uproot a weed without discovering some ancient piece of aqueduct or something. The Italians are pretty unnerved about this. The piazza de la signioria in Florence was dug up for a few years back in the early 90ies. Everyone was relieved when they finally closed it up again.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You could destroy anything you find in the name of the future.
You could save anything you find in the name of the past.
Or you could find some balance in between in the name of the present.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
When I was in college, I did a semester abroad trip to Greece and Italy. One of the Greek guides explained that contractors dig up ruins all the time in Athens; it's impossible to dig a metro line without it happening. (Here's one example of a metro line running right through ruins of Ancient Athens.)
The guide told us that Greek law requires that contractors notify the Ministry of Culture immediately when ruins are found. They then come out, inspect the site, and after a couple years, either give the contractor a waver to remove the ruins or provide them an alternative plan for building around them. Contractors will often collect the ruins they find and keep them at their private residences, because it takes way too much time to let the Ministry of Culture to have their way.
I was recently in Rome and the primary thing I got was the locals lamenting the crumbling infrastructure including the decaying and inadequate public transportation. One running joke was be careful taking the bus since they tend to spontaneously combust. Although I'm sure there was a certain pride in living in the Eternal City and desire for preserving that history, trying to survive day to day tends to take priority over that.
Who is John Galt?
Clearly, Rome should never have built a subway in the first place. If they had built an above-ground monorail, this problem would not be happening. Plus, Rome would finally be put on the map just like Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook. Just think of the tourism dollars.
I heard, back in the late 90's when mobile phones were just becoming common place, that in Rome they were selling like hot cakes.
Trying to lay wiring in that city was the reason given.
Every time they stick a spade in the ground they find something ancient and all work stops while the archeologists move in.
So getting a new land line was tricky. Wireless provide to be the solution for the modern day Romans.
I would think the ancient sewers of Rome would mitigate some what the need to tunnel for wiring.
Not much help for subways though.
I live in Rome.
It may be an opportunity.... but we have literally hundreds of thousands of similar opportunities all over the place. and while I agree that these are precious artefacts that ought to be studied and made available to the public to be seen, the truth is that there's no funding for that, and so they mostly get buried back to preserve them. This while the infrastructure works are delayed for decades, to nobody's advantage. I mean, it's Rome. There's bound to be Roman artefacts, since Romans have lived here for the past few thousands of years.
No one is forced to live in a particular city. If one wants to live in the (gorgeous) open-air museum that Rome is, but cannot afford to live in the central part of the city, he must take into account that daily commuting will take a little longer than usual, because the subway network cannot be - and will never be - as dense as in other cities. Surely in San Francisco, Berlin or Tokyo you can commute faster, but you also cannot see the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain or Piazza di Spagna. Different people have different priorities and will decide where they want to live accordingly.
The battle of Carthage was a massacre.
Sure was.
What part of "... the Roman general going postal[k] on them." don't you get? I'd think it was clear even with the typo.
1. Lay siege to Carthage - intending to do the usual thing of annexing them and ending up with them as a new province, religious freedom and all.
2. The Carthaginians' priests declare that the people have angered their god and a sacrifice is needed to make the Romans go away.
3. The people are convinced and a sacrifice is made. Their god happens to be Molloch, so they round up all the babies and toss them in the idol's fire.
4. The smog from this blows over to the Roman positions. The general, who knows how their religion works, gets a whiff.
5. The general goes ballistic. No baby-burning fanatics are going to be merged into the Roman Empire on HIS watch.
6. The Romans level the city, kill every adult they can get their hands on (or a sword or spear into), tear up the surrounding countryside, and sew salt on it so that Carthage will never rise again.
7. No profit for Carthage, from then on.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It depends on the locals you ask to. Surely those who live in the suburbs and need daily commuting might be pissed off, but I can hardly imagine the wealthy people who live close to the Trevi Fountain complaining about public transportation, let alone preferring to level down the fountain itself to get a new subway station.
I live in Rome.
It may be an opportunity.... but we have literally hundreds of thousands of similar opportunities all over the place. and while I agree that these are precious artefacts that ought to be studied and made available to the public to be seen, the truth is that there's no funding for that, and so they mostly get buried back to preserve them. This while the infrastructure works are delayed for decades, to nobody's advantage. I mean, it's Rome. There's bound to be Roman artefacts, since Romans have lived here for the past few thousands of years.
Yeah, ideally the archaeologists would get some additional funding so they could help compensate for the increased construction costs though that doesn't really work politically.
Which reminds me, I was originally gonna write "priceless artifacts" in my original post but then I thought better of it, turns out with good reason.
I stole this Sig
I'll try to translate: The construction of the Rome's subway is halted because of archaeology research. Tools from the era when the subway construction started are found in the borehole.
Yeah, I used to live in Rome too. I worked in a crumbling laboratory. When we finally did get money to build a new one, we did and it was great, then at the end of construction the road was built... and hit a Roman villa and cisterns. It delayed the opening of the new lab by 5 years, while the old one crumbled completely. When we finally moved into the new one, everything had been stolen inside: toilets, doors, windows, ceiling tiles, even entire floors... Back to square one.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
It's almost harder to find a metro/subway/underground tunnel that didn't find interesting archaeology, provided that archaeologists were allowed in.
Just hope that your new subway project doesn't run into an old plague pit.