Researchers from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, along with colleagues from Austria and France, have used carbonate deposits recovered from Roman water mills in Barbegal, near the city of Arles in the south of France, to reconstruct the development and…
In 1789, an opinion column in The Times hailed Britain’s canal-building achievements as a matter of national pride – contrasting them with the revolutionary turmoil in France. Aristocrats and entrepreneurs were losing their heads across the Channel, while in Britain they were busy building and funding a canal network that would serve the rapid growth of the nation as an industrial power. In his new book on the Swansea Canal, Stephen Hughes looks in detail at the archaeology and history of one such pioneering enterprise, as Chris Catling reports.
After years of research, Steve Mitchell and John Poulter hypothesise that the Raw Dykes – a double-banked ditch located 2km south of Leicester’s Roman public baths – is a remnant of a navigable Roman canal. Their full results were recently…
Review by Dylan K Rogers To say that the Roman world was overflowing with water is an understatement. Recently, scholarship has increasingly begun to explore the numerous ways water impacted the lives of ancient Romans, from understanding the design of…
Today, Istanbul – formerly Constantinople – is Europe’s largest metropolis, having grown dramatically in size since the 1970s to reach a population in excess of 17 million. But despite the gleaming modern towers, busy expressways and seemingly endless urban sprawl,…
Supplying Constantinople with water was a monumental challenge that received a monumental solution. Examining the extraordinary remains of aqueducts, bridges, and cisterns reveals the ingenuity – and expense – committed to sating a thirsty ancient metropolis, as James Crow explains.
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The layers of tunnels under Naples preserve traces of Greek life and death in ancient Italy. Dalu Jones heads beneath the surface to visit ongoing restoration work that is making an ancient tomb and its rare surviving Greek paintings accessible to the public.