Ben Kane

In the Sabine hills northeast of Rome, archaeologists are now confident that they have identified the remains of Emperor Vespasian’s summer villa. Four years of digs have resulted in the discovery of huge rooms with magnificent mosaic floors and marbled halls. Read about it here.

Our thoughts of chemical warfare automatically gravitate to the horrors of World War I and the mustard gas immortalised by photographs of lines of blind men and the poems of some of the war poets. However there is new evidence from Dura-Europos, the great Roman fortress in modern day Syria. It was besieged by the Persians in the 3rd Century AD,and has recently provided some startling finds which may point to the use of chemical warfare over 1700 years before WWI. Read about it here.

Hadrian’s Wall is often the site of interesting new finds, most notably of course the Vindolanda writing tablets. Every summer, scores of archaeologists descend on the various forts to see what they can discover. Big finds are rare, but this summer has proved an exception as you can see here.

Couldn’t not put up a post while on holiday! Apologies to any of you who’ve emailed me and not had a reply – I forgot to take the passwords which would allow me to access emails on the site from a remote location, so I can’t read them until I get back.

For those of you who love Rome, and all things Roman – check out www.romanarmy.com simply the best Roman website there is.  Full of  Roman reenactors, historians, academics, enthusiasts and some writers like me, it has more information available on it than a hundred textbooks! I use it all the time.

Today I reached 130,000 words in The Road to Rome, the third book in the Forgotten Legion trilogy, which means that I’ve only got about another 15,000 to go! However I’m off on my hols for a couple of weeks with my family, so I won’t get to finish it until August. Bummer. My posts won’t be as often either. I hope all you readers are having hols too, in somewhere sunnier than I’m going (Ireland!)….

In 1900, a Greek sponge diver found a metal object wrapped up in coral off the island of Antikythera. He carried it to the surface and it was examined by historians, but its true nature wasn’t really discovered until the 1950s. Even then, the scientists working on it did not truly understand its purpose. It has only been in the last few years, using high tech X-ray equipment, that they have discovered that it is in fact a sophisticated clock like mechanism, with complex internal gears worked by cogs – using more advanced technology than anything known to have been produced until the 14th Century! It has been dated to approx. 100-150 BC. Watch the fascinating Nature video on it here