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The remains of an imperial Roman legionary camp -- the only one of its kind ever to be excavated in Israel or in the entirety of the Eastern Empire from the second and third centuries CE -- have come to light at a dig near Megiddo, archaeologists said this week. Legio, a Roman site situated next to Tel Megiddo in northern Israel, served as the headquarters of the Sixth Legion Ferrata -- the Ironclad -- in the years following the Jewish Revolt, and would have helped keep order in the Galilee during the Bar Kochba Revolt in 132-135 CE... In...

For the first time, the camp of the Sixth Roman Legion may have been located. Analyzing an enhanced high-resolution satellite photo, archaeologist Yotam Tepper of the Israel Antiquities Authority, in collaboration with the Jezreel Valley Regional Project, identified what he believes to be the camp’s square-shaped boundary. The team conducted ground-penetrating radar and electromagnetic testing and subsequently carried out excavations at the site. They uncovered the base of a battery or wall, a moat surrounding the camp, water pipes, a covered sewage channel, coins, tiles and a shingle decorated with the legion’s symbol. These discoveries seem to support Tepper’s identification...

Rome, Sweet Rome: Could a Single Marine Unit Destroy the Roman Empire? It was a hypothetical question that became a long online discussion and now a movie in development: Could a small group of heavily armed modern-day Marines take down the Roman Empire at its height? We talked about the debate with James Erwin, the man who scored a movie writing contract based on his online response, and ran the ideas by Roman history expert Adrian Goldsworthy. James Erwin was browsing reddit.com on his lunch break when a thread piqued his interest. A user called The_Quiet_Earth had posed the question:...