Italian Round-up

Some gobbets for the skewer:

Italian police recover 3500 artifacts looted from "an Etruscan site near Rome." (IHT)


The 8th Roman Archaeology Conference, 3-5 April 2009 at the University of Michigan, will include several sessions of immediate interest to the discerning Italicist:
-The Late Republican period in "native" Southern Italy
Organizer: Fabio Colivicchi (Queen's University)
-Kings, Clans and Conflict: Italic Warfare in the first millennium BC
Organizers: Hilary Becker (Washington & Lee University) and Jeremy Armstrong (University of Auckland)
-Current Approaches to the Archaeology of first millennium BC Italian Urbanism
Organizers: Jeffrey Becker (Boston University) and Elizabeth Robinson (University of North Carolina)
-Comparative issues in the archaeology of the Roman rural landscape, site classification between survey, excavation and historical categories
Organizers: Peter A.J. Attema (University of Groningen) and Günther Schoerner (Friedrich-Schiller Universität, Jena)

(Session abstracts available here)


There's some novita' at the Center for Etruscan Studies' website. They're beginning to post back-issues of the journal Etruscan Studies, starting with Volume 8, 2001 (confusingly labeled 2008). Some of the links are misdirected at the moment, to the host bepress.com rather than http://scholarworks.umass.edu...


Excavations on the site of a Late Antique villa in Spello, Umbria have uncovered a mosaic (Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici dell'Umbria, with photo)


Michele Stefanile reports at Archeologia Subacquea on the supposed discovery of Roman Misenum in a Google Earth satellite image, but remains skeptical. You can see the area in question also via Google Maps here. Stefanile's skepticism is well-founded; compare the rectilinear features that appear in the satellite image further east in the Bay of Naples. I bet you could find a similar pattern many other places around the world due to imaging artifacts. I suppose it's a bit like seeing Jesus in your toast.


There are some nice photos of the Terme Ruler at EternallyCool.net.