Ancient Mediterranean Archaeological Discoveries
Archaeologists uncover ancient tombs, aqueducts, and settlements across Italy, Croatia, and Greece.
Anonymous
Archaeological work across Italy, Greece and Croatia is revealing new evidence about ancient settlement, burial and water-management practices. In Monteleone Sabino, researchers documented about 100 meters of a pre-Roman aqueduct carved into rock, likely built to regulate water for agriculture and reflecting organized settlement in ancient Sabina. Excavations at Salona’s western necropolis uncovered 32 graves, including a rare face-down Roman burial containing glass vessels, perfume containers, engraved gems and other grave goods. A landslide in eastern Italy also exposed a previously unknown pre-Roman burial site with distinctive pottery, grave markers and personal artifacts, though investigations remain underway. Meanwhile, Athens’ Kerameikos cemetery has reopened after upgrades that added an accessible entrance, improved paths, a café and a new gift shop.
Key Points
1
The Monteleone Sabino conduit has an ogival cross-section and was excavated using transverse access tunnels followed by parallel digging along the hill—an unusually complex construction method for the period.
2
Researchers associate the aqueduct with a network of small pre-Roman settlements, or vici, linked by a strategic road between the inland Apennines and the Tiberine Sabina; they identify these settlements with the rural district, or pagus, of the Mutuesci.
3
At Salona, the 32 newly investigated graves were evenly divided between 16 cremation burials and 16 inhumations, bringing the total number of graves examined at the western necropolis to 152.
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The face-down burial included an especially unusual unguentarium shaped like a date, along with three other glass perfume vessels, four ceramic vessels, two engraved gems and fragments of a bronze object.
5
The Salona grave lay above the remains of an earlier destroyed wall, prompting archaeologists to reconsider the sequence and organization of funerary structures in that section of the necropolis.
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