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Roman Archaeology Blog
- Posted on Sunday April 07, 2024
A large Roman villa was uncovered in Oxfordshire. Credit: Red River Archaeology GroupThe complex was adorned with intricate painted plaster and mosaics and housed a collection of small, tightly coiled lead scrolls. The Red River Archaeology Group (RRAG), the organization responsible for coordinating the excavation, announced in a press release that these elements suggest that the site may have been used for rituals or pilgrimages.Francesca Giarelli, the Red River Archaeology Group project officer and the site director, told CNN that the villa likely had multiple levels. The Roman villa complex, spanning an impressive 1,000 square meters (or 10,800 square feet) on its ground floor alone, was likely a prominent landmark visible from miles away.“The sheer size of the buildings that still survive and the richness of goods recovered suggest this was a dominant feature in the locality if not the wider landscape,” says Louis Stafford, a senior project manager at RRAG, in the statement.Read the rest of this article... Continue Reading... - Posted on Sunday April 07, 2024
Today, Smallhythe Place in Kent is best known as a bohemian rural retreat once owned by the Victorian actress Ellen Terry and her daughter Edy Craig. As this month’s cover feature reveals, however, the surrounding fields preserve evidence of much earlier activity, including a medieval royal shipyard and a previously unknown Roman settlement (below, first image). Our next feature comes from the heavy clays of the Humber Estuary, where excavations sparked by theconstruction of an offshore windfarm have opened a 40km transect through northern Lincolnshire, with illuminating results (below, second image). We then take a tour of Iron Age, Roman, and medieval Winchester, tracing its evolution into a regional capital and later a royal power centre.Read the rest of this article... Continue Reading... - Posted on Wednesday January 31, 2024
Tom Quad, Christ Church, Oxford University – image David BeardThe Oxford Experience summer school is held at Christ Church, Oxford. Participants stay in Christ Church and eat in the famous Dining Hall, that was the model for the Hall in the Harry Potter movies.This year there are twelve classes offered in archaeology.You can find the list of courses here… Continue Reading... - Posted on Monday January 29, 2024
‘It was killing fields as far as the eye can see’ … the Latin-inscribed slabs crossing the site of the battle, which features in the British Museum show Legion.Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian‘Their heads were nailed to the trees’: what was life – and death – like for Roman legionaries?It was the defeat that traumatised Rome, leaving 15,000 soldiers slaughtered in a German field. As a major show explores this horror and more, our writer finds traces of the fallen by a forest near the RhineIt is one of the most chilling passages in Roman literature. Germanicus, the emperor Tiberius’s nephew, is leading reprisals in the deeply forested areas east of the Rhine, when he decides to visit the scene of the catastrophic defeat, six years before, of his fellow Roman, Quinctilius Varus. The historian Tacitus describes what Germanicus finds: the ghastly human wreckage of a supposedly unbeatable army, deep in the Teutoburg Forest. “On the open ground,” he writes, “were whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Near lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads, prominently nailed to trunks of trees.”Read the rest of this article... Continue Reading... - Posted on Monday January 29, 2024
Schematic drawing of the relationship between climatic change and sociological, physical, and biological factors influencing infectious disease outbreaks.Credit: Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk1033A team of geoscientists, Earth scientists and environmental scientists affiliated with several institutions in Germany, the U.S. and the Netherlands has found a link between cold snaps and pandemics during the Roman Empire.In their project, reported in the journal Science Advances, the group studied core samples taken from the seabed in the Gulf of Taranto and compared them with historical records.Researchers learn about climatic conditions in the distant past by analyzing sediment built up from river deposits. Tiny organisms that are sensitive to temperature, for example, respond differently to warm temperatures than to cold temperatures and often wind up in such sediment. Thus, the study of organic remains in sediment layers can reveal details of temperatures over a period of time.Read the rest of this article... Continue Reading...
Archaeology and Egyptology in the 21st century
- Posted on Wednesday February 25, 2026
In the Autumn, I reviewed the excellent and very interesting exhibition Alan Sorrell ‘Nubia’ at the Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend on sea and I subsequently followed up with post about the location of Sorrell’s ‘Marea’, subject of his paintings number 45 and 46. That exhibition also inspired this post, because in addition to the rather wonderful paintings by Sorrell, it included a painting of the Colossi of Memnon by Edward Lear from 1854. This is the only painting in the exhibition that is not by Sorrell, and it is also from the 19th century, making it a chronological outlier. It is still a beautiful painting of a recognisable landscape and it reminded me of another 19th centruy painting of the Colossi, I had seen before, in the dining room of the Randolph Hotel, Oxford.
Edward Lear’s 1854 watercolour painting ‘At Thebes, Egypt’ of the Colossi of Memnon. (Author photograph at the ‘Alan Sorrell ‘Nubia’ exhibition at the Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend on sea, 2025).
Edward Lear, 1854, At Thebes, Egypt.
The painting by Edward Lear is titled, At Thebes, Egypt, and shows the Colossi from the north, that is from a short distance behind the left shoulder of the right colossus as you stand in front of them. The Colossi sit on flat ground, with no evidence of other structures. Behind the Colossi are a group of camels, many lying down, and beyond them in background, the distant desert escarpment. Between the camels and the escarpment on the right of the painting is a low rise with ruins.
The Colossi of Memnon in 2025, looking north-west towards Medinet Habu. The higher road and buildings beyond now obscure any structures or topography beyond (Author photograph).
The landscape has changed so much since this painting was created that it is difficult to know if the ruins that appear on the right beyond the Colossi were present when Lear was painting. Given the position of the painter, it is possible that the ruins represent the Temple of Thutmose III and later town of Medinet Habu, although I would have thought it was further to the right (that is further north) beyond the limit of the image. Alternatively they just might be remains of the Palace of Amenhotep III at Malkata or later structures built on the mounds around its lake, the Birket Habu! It is difficult to tell from the modern landscape because the modern buildings now obscure structures beyond the Colossi.
A, presumably, AI generated image showing the pyramids of Giza with the Great Sphinx at ludicrously large size and in the wrong location. Originally appearing as a lock-screen image on PCs, the image was purchased from Shutterstock.
The image may not represent the landscape as Lear saw it. It’s possible that both the camels and the ruins are due to artistic license. Artists often incorporated features that weren’t visible in the landscape to create the right mood. In 19th century paintings of Egypt Orientalist attitudes meant that both camels and ruins were popular ... Continue Reading... - “How do you solve a problem like Marea?” Locating a site from the exhibition, ‘Alan Sorrell ‘Nubia”.Posted on Wednesday December 24, 2025
My last post was a review of the excellent and very interesting exhibition Alan Sorrell ‘Nubia’ at the Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend on sea. The exhibition provided a fascinating look at the archaeological, landscape and life of southern Egypt and norther Sudan, prior to Lake Nasser. Although the accompanying information panels included a wealth of interesting archaeological details I did note one possible misidentification in the paintings. Painting number 45 shows a place named ‘Marea’, with vaulted ruins overlooking a watery landscape and a riverbank in the background. The painting and associated information are presented below:
Sorrell’s painting number 45, identified as Marea, near Alexandria (Author photograph).
“It is thought that this scene depicts Marea. Marea was a bustling port city and pilgrimage centre near Alexandria, thriving during the Late Antique and Early Islamic periods. Excavations have revealed as well-preserved basilica, bathhouses, wine-presses and a necropolis, highlighting the city’s importance as a hub of trade, religion and daily life.”Sign for painting 45 at the Alan Sorrell ‘Nubia’ exhibition, Beecroft Art Gallery , Southend on sea, 2025.
The location of the Alexandrian Marea, on a peninsula in Lake Maryut (Mareotis).
The label suggests that this paintings shows Marea, a town near Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast. The Alexandrian Marea has recently been excavated by a Polish-Egyptian team and based on the report of Babraj (et al. 2014), the site is located on the south side of Lake Maryut (Mareotis) about 45 km south-west of Alexandria. The outline of the excavated buildings are clearly visible in the Google satellite imagery. Today the site is on an oddly right-angled peninsula projecting into the lake, but water levels and the lake extents are likely to have changed over time.
Sorrell’s painting number 46, Marea, note the Nubian-style decoration on the buildings in the background. It proved impossible to remove the glare while keeping all the features of the painting visible (Author photograph).
It would be quite surprising if Sorrell had painted the Alexandrian Marea. Most of his paintings relate to southern Egypt, almost a thousand miles away. Although the vaulted ruins in painting 45 could easily be Late Antique, the landscape behind them is not particularly Alexandrian. The desert is rather arid. I would expect more vegetation on Lake Maryut, and the colours of the landscape are darker. The buildings in the right background of painting 45 have the pointed corners also seen on Nubian houses in, for example, Sorrell’s painting (number 50) of Dabud. The Nubian-style buildings appear much more clearly in painting 46, which is also labelled Marea. The signage describes painting 46 in Sorrell’s words as ‘a posting-station on the riverbank’, which is unusual phrasing if he painted the Alexandrian Marea on the lakeshore.
Sorrell’s location map, showing which paintings came from each site. ‘Maria’ is marked between Sabagura and Kalabsha. Unfortunately it was not possible to improve the image. (Author photograph)
The solution appears in Sorrell’s map, which shows a place named ‘Maria’, associated with paintings 45 and 46, ... Continue Reading... - Posted on Wednesday October 29, 2025
The Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend-on-sea, is currently showing an exhibition of paintings by local artist and archaeological illustrator, Alan Sorrell. Alan Sorrell featured in my earlier blog post and a small selection of his paintings were included in Southend Museum’s Wunderkammer exhibition, which I reviewed separately here. The new Beecroft Art Gallery exhibition is a much more extensive review of Sorrell’s Nubian paintings, created in southern Egypt and north Sudan in 1962 when he was commissioned by the Illustrated London News to record the UNESCO International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, in advance of the flooding of Lake Nasser behind the recently constructed Aswan High Dam. As a result the paintings in this exhibition reveal a long-vanished past. Although many of the temples were moved and can be visited in locations similar to their original position, their environment has inevitably changed.
View of the facades of both temples at Abu Simbel, with the Great Temple of Ramesses II in the background and the smaller temple of Queen Nefertari, dedicated to Hathor in the foreground. (Author photograph).
I visited the exhibition in June 2025 and its a fantastic exhibition of paintings that are rarely seen, but represent an important aspect of the history of archaeology. If you want to visit, the Beecroft Art Gallery is on Victoria Avenue, a short walk from Southend Victoria station (Liverpool Street Line) and a slightly longer walk from Southend Central station (Fenchurch Street line).
The monuments of Nubia
The exhibition begins with an introduction to Alan Sorrell and the UNESCO campaign, accompanied by a map made by Sorrell, showing the sites along the Nile from Thebes (Luxor) down to Semna in north Sudan. Each site name accompanied by a small sketch and numbers indicating which paintings came from there. The exhibition is organised as a down the Nile from south to north, beginning with an interesting painting identified as the temple of Hatshepsut from Semna West. I included the famous sketch of the outer defences of Buhen in my previous post about Alan Sorrell and his work, but this exhibition features another fantastic sketch of the walls of Buhen, this time from the external ditch (image below). Even in its damaged state, after over 3000 years of history, I would not like to mount an assault upon those walls!
Sorrell’s painting of the walls of Buhen from the ditch. (Author photograph)
The roll of famous sites continues with a series of watercolours of Abu Simbel, poster-child for the UNESCO campaign (top image). There are some fantastic paintings of the interior, and a matched pair of paintings of Abu Simbel in the daytime and Abu Simbel at night. There are two particularly fine images showing water lapping against the entrance of Derr temple and the Wadi es-Sebua temple pylon, so different from the relocated temples high above the lake. Wadi es-Sebua also represents the multi-layered history of the region, with a painting of the temple interior showing the Ramesside court and pylon, with its ... Continue Reading... - Posted on Wednesday August 27, 2025
It’s been almost a year since I posted. A family crisis and intensive work have filled my time, but things are easing and I am intending to publish every two months going forward. In the last year I’ve been adapting to ArcGIS Pro, so expect some posts and videos about that in future. I’ve also been working on the Egypt Exploration Society’s Delta Survey Online web-map, which you can go and interact with at https://www.ees.ac.uk/our-cause/research/delta-survey.html. Just follow the last tab to the ‘Delta Survey Online’ (scroll down to the bottom of the page if you are on a handheld device) and view the data in the embed, or click through to the ArcGIS Online map to explore, analyse and export.
The Asyut Region Project
The location of the Gebel Asyut el-Gharbi in Middle Egypt. (British War Office Survey of Egypt 1:25000 scale map of Asyut, from the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL), Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago).
In 2017-19 I worked on the Asyut Region Project, looking at the archive of David George Hogarth’s excavations in 1906-7 at Asyut. I continued this research independtly after the end of the project and a paper from this work has recently been published. My 2024 article in Interdisciplinary Egyptology, ‘Resurrecting the Archive: Revitalising records of Hogarth’s excavations in the Gebel Asyut el-Gharbi necropolis, Egypt 1906–1907’, proposes approximate locations for the tombs Hogarth excavated on the Gebel Asyut el-Gharbi in 1906-7, based on his sketch-map, the descriptions in his Notebook and Diary and some judicious satellite-imagery-based detective work (Pethen 2024). You can read all about it at https://doi.org/10.25365/integ.2025.v4.1.
During the course of this research and while working on my previous article on the Hogarth’s pottery corpus (Pethen 2021), I noted that it was possible to track Hogarth’s movement across the Gebel Asyut el-Gharbi from the combination of his Diary and Notebook entries and the approximate locations of the tombs he excavated. It was not possible to visualise the progress of the excavation in the published articles, but it can be visualised in an ArcGIS Story Map.
The sketch map of Hogarth’s excavations at the Gebel Asyut el-Gharbi. British Museum Dept of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, Correspondence 1907 A-K, 321 (© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence).
Dating Hogarth’s tombs by discovery or excavation date
Before creating a Story Map showing how Hogarth moved across the Gebel between December 1906 and February 1907, it was necessary to cross-reference the records in Hogarth’s Notebook and Diary to determine when he first found each of the tombs in the sketch-map. I used the earliest dated reference to a tomb in either document. Given the somewhat variable nature of Hogarth’s recording (for more details of which see Pethen 2021; 2024), this means that the date associated with the tombs is sometimes the date that Hogath first noted the tomb, and sometimes the first day of the excavation. The table below shows the dates first associated with ... Continue Reading...
- Posted on Wednesday September 25, 2024
In July’s post, I reviewed The Telegraph’s assertion that the Pitt-Rivers Museum had been ‘hiding’ objects that women were not supposed to see. You can find an archived version of the original Telegraph article here. The article is superficially about the exclusion of an object from public display (including digital display in collections online) to explicitly prevent a certain group (in this case women) from seeing that object. It’s main argument has been largely refuted in this article by the Pitt Rivers Museum, and in two threads about digital and in person access byMadeline Odent (@oldenoughtosay), on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
In my previous post, I looked at the misunderstandings about museums that underpinned The Telegraph’s article. A careful reading of the article reveals that neither women’s access to the Igbo mask, nor the somewhat more philosophically interesting subject of who should be able to access taboo or sensitive objects, is its real theme! It’s primary purpose is to denigrate the Pitt Rivers Museum’s policies on cultural sensitivity, and the decolonisation process of which they form a part. So far so boring and predictable, but what is interesting about this article are the methods it uses to manipulate the reader.
Reverse Outlining
To take a really close look at the Telegraph article, I printed it out and numbered the paragraphs. Then on the left side of the paper I noted the points of each paragraph, and on the right side, details that jumped out at me about how the article was written. If you want to see what that looks like, I’ve posted images of the results below. I have blurred the human remains in two of the images so those who do not wish to see are not accidentally exposed. Annoyingly, the final sentence of the article has strayed onto a fourth page, but it is functionally the end of the previous paragraph. For copyright purposes please note that I reproduce these images of the marked-up article here, without ‘alt-text’ of the article content, as a means to criticism and review. They are not meant for in-depth reading, but merely as a visual guide to how I analysed the article.
For those with an interest in academic writing techniques, I used a process known as ‘Reverse Outlining‘ in analysing the Telegraph article. If you want to see more about how it works, you can follow the previous link to Pat Thompson’s incredibly useful patter blog, or this article by Rachael Cayley.
First page of the reverse outlined Telegraph article. I have blurred the image of the tsantsa.
Second page of the reverse outlined Telegraph article.
Third page of the reverse outlined Telegraph article. I have blurred out the human remains in the photograph at the top.
The fourth page of the reverse outlined Telegraph article, only includes one sentence from the article.
Womens rights
The article is framed as an expose of a threat to women’s rights in the form of restrictions placed on the public display ... Continue Reading...
