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Researchers have discovered the remnants of a massive Roman villa thought to have ties to Pliny the Elder while working on an urban renewal project in Bacoli, close to the northwest end of the Bay of Naples.2,000 years ago, the villa would have sat on a cliffside, commanding 360° views of the Gulf of Naples and the islands of Ischia and Procida in the background.The monumental villa, estimated to have been built in the first century, was discovered by the researchers while Bacoli's urban renewal projects were underway, the Superintendency of Archeology, Fine Arts, and Landscape for the Naples Metropolitan...

The "miracle" plant Silphium consumed by Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, which was thought to have become extinct two thousand years ago, has recently been rediscovered in Turkey by a professor, who thinks he's found a botanical survivor.The plant, which the Ancient Greeks called silphion (silphium), was a golden-flowered plant. It was once the most sought-after product in the Mediterranean even before the rise of Athens and the Roman Empire.It is believed that the plant with yellow flowers attached to a thick stalk was crushed, roasted, sauteed, and boiled for medicinal purposes, food, and even contraception. During the reign of...

...A century later, the Italian military historian Flavio Russo suggested that the attribution should be settled by scientific investigation. Might an isotopic examination of the teeth reveal where the skull’s owner had spent his childhood? A campaign led by La Stampa eventually raised funds for a study of the relic at the hands of a scientific team fronted by popular historian Andrea Cionci. The results, released in January 2020 at the Museo dell’ Arte Sanitaria, were somewhat ambiguous. Isotopic examination of the lower jaw indicated a childhood consistent with the early life spent by the Elder Pliny in his north...

Team finds secret of mummies' preservation October 22 2003 at 05:18PM By Chris Slocombe London - A German research team has unravelled the mystery of how the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead, using sophisticated science to track the preservative to an extract of the cedar tree. Chemists from Tuebingen University and the Munich-based Doerner-Institut replicated an ancient treatment of cedar wood and found it contained a preservative chemical called guaiacol. "Modern science has finally found the secret of why some mummies can last for thousands of years," Ulrich Weser of Tuebingen University told Reuters on Wednesday. The team extracted the...