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Teenagers Stayed Overnight at Their School and Found Hidden Ancient Roman Ruins
- napolux 4mo agoIn Italy, almost anywhere you can find roman artifacts. They're just in the layer underneath the WW2 bombs.
- karmakurtisaani 4mo agoIt's truly amazing. In Rome, you can find ruins of all historical periods, all the way up to early 2020s!
- Dependance 4mo agoThere must be a metaphor somewhere in this, when somehow it is the angry youth that discovers something of value hidden in plain view that no one bothered to look at before !
- al_borland 4mo agoI visited Rome last year. There was a lot of talk about how long it was taking to build a new subway line, because they kept running into ancient artifacts. It was also commonly said that the city was like a lasagna, with layers upon layers of history under everything. Building that were originally built elevated are now at street level. It almost seems hard not to find ancient ruins. It then becomes a question of priorities and resource allocation.
- sidewndr46 4mo agoI thought the buildings getting lower was just the ground compressing. The foundation is solid, but the ground underneath still compresses. There are circumstances like Seattle where they literally built up the city, but those are less common
- vanattab 4mo agoNo. The ground does not usually significantly compress under those loads. Remember for much of human history buildings are build with wood and non vitrified bricks that readily break back-down into mud/gravel/organic matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(archaeology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(archaeology)
- RetroTechie 4mo agoIf they're so common, why not incorporate into the construction project? Walk through a modern subway, see bits & pieces of ancient history all over the place. Buy icecream, sit on a bench that labourers hacked out of stone 2ky ago.
- jldugger 4mo agoI mean, it's the rest of the subway line thats the problem -- how many ancient sites do you tunnel through to reach the next stop?
- incanus77 4mo agoI visited Athens in 2006 shortly after the Olympics were held there and the city had been refreshed. The Syntagma Square subway station did exactly this, with layers of archaeology revealed behind glass as you descended the stairs. It was magnificent!
- SiempreViernes 4mo agoThey do do that? https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260408-a-150-metro-ticket-to-ancient-rome https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260408-a-150-metro-tick...
- olalonde 4mo agoReminds me that story about the beach table in Bulgaria, that turned out to be a 1,700-year-old Roman tomb: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article291042710.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article2...
- rsynnott 4mo agoThat's actually done a lot in ruin-heavy cities. For instance, here's a Lidl with bonus underfloor Viking village in Dublin: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/aungier-street-lidl-archaelogy https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/aungier-street-lidl-arch...
- vitally3643 4mo agoBecause it's more expensive and takes longer (which then makes it even more expensive). Which is why ancient ruins in construction sites are often covered up, unreported, or even destroyed.
- WalterBright 4mo agoMy obvious thought is why not dig deeper to build the subways?
- al_borland 4mo agoI’m not sure how deep the new one is, but some of them I went on already seemed extremely deep. I felt like I was on escalators for a long time, and multiple tiers, to the point I was Googling what the tallest escalators were when getting back to my hotel (Rome didn’t make the cut). There is definitely a cost to going deeper, in construction, ongoing maintenance, and the experience for the rider.
- hvb2 4mo agoThere was graffiti as well so others had already found it
- amarcheschi 4mo agoIn my tuscanian city the university is building a new building for the engineering department. While digging they randomly found an ancient etruscan well. In this case everything went smoothly and timely and it will be preserved, an underground parking near the center had ww2 remains and deeper than that, archeological ones that slowed down the whole thing
- jrjrjrkrfkfkkr 4mo ago[dead]
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- glouwbug 4mo agoAre you okay? They were teenagers. We were all there and we all tried. The logistics of having 7 billion people quarantine while international flights and asymptomatic carriers carried on made it _impossible_ to not play out like it did
- ufurrurjj 4mo ago[flagged]
- glouwbug 4mo agoThis is obviously you on another account. What are you trying to accomplish?
- jrjrjrkrfkfkkr 4mo ago[flagged]
- khazhoux 4mo agoI can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not (BLM riot). If you truly believe large gatherings were murder ("killed his grandma") then why would you excuse people doing so just to signal support for BLM?
- theoe93orrj 4mo ago[flagged]
- mothballed 4mo ago
- fredley 4mo ago> To William’s complete lack of surprise, the little cellar under the shed was much better built than the shed itself. But then, practically everywhere in Ankh-Morpork had cellars that were once the first or even second or third floors of ancient buildings, built at the time of one of the city’s empires when men thought that the future was going to last for ever. And then the river had flooded and brought mud with it, and walls had gone higher and, now, what Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork. People said that anyone with a good sense of direction and a pickaxe could cross the city underground by simply knocking holes in walls.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoFor a modern example, see the Raising of Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago. I think I've seen an image of what the old ground level looks like now, and / or that you can take tours there. There's probably loads of stuff buried there now. Edit: Actually it was Seattle, you can still visit its old ground level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
- spwa4 4mo agohttps://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Old_New_York https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Old_New_York
- cdjk 4mo ago... was once New Amsterdam
- WorldMaker 4mo agoMy understanding of the Chicago case is that most of what the old "ground level" was is just sewers today. I heard some of it was railroad tracks and maybe some are still used for cargo-only trains, but most of Chicago wasn't really raised a full "floor" with enough headroom for interesting underground spaces. A US city often overlooked for some intricate people explorable underground spaces is Cincinnati: https://www.visitcincy.com/blog/post/unmistakably-cincinnati-underground-experiences/ https://www.visitcincy.com/blog/post/unmistakably-cincinnati... Some of Cincinnati's underground exists from plans to build subway trains that never completed. I think that makes Cincinnati's particularly sad being that it constitutes a perpetually unfinished public works/public transportation project. Relatedly to that, Atlanta also has a tiny underground leftover from passenger train lines that ended passenger travel decades ago (and so was turned into a mall, because America): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Atlanta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Atlanta
- MrBuddyCasino 4mo agoWhose first instinct is it, when finding an ancient roman villa hidden underneath your school, to smear graffiti on the walls. I cannot relate.
- txru 4mo agoIt seems that the students who actually reported the ruins may not have been the ones who graffiti'd it. They supposedly heard from other students who'd discovered it before. Whether or not that's true is harder to say.
- MrBuddyCasino 4mo agoDoes it matter which generation of students did it?
- DougN7 4mo agoAs an American, where we have comparatively little history (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!) visiting Rome is almost mind blowing to see SO MUCH ancient history right there, and almost everywhere. So cool!
- cableshaft 4mo agoThere are older structures and artifacts than 250 years, they're just not European in origin. Like Cahokia Mounds in Illinois: https://cahokiamounds.org/ https://cahokiamounds.org/ Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.
- stephenhuey 4mo agoI've been to Cahokia, and look forward to revisiting it in future decades since only 10% has been excavated so far!
- cableshaft 4mo agoSame!
- contingencies 4mo agoA few years ago I made a graphic showing the years before present dates of some of the earliest archaeological sites across the Americas for Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopling_of_the_Americas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_the_Clovis_First_theory#Evidence_of_human_habitation_before_Clovis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_the_Clovis_Fir...
- rigonkulous 4mo agoNarwala Gabarnmang says hi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung 44,000 years of continuous human occupation. (Except for a brief period during the 20th century ..)
- newaccountman2 4mo agoDid the ruins come alive at night with like Roman soldiers and stuff running around, etc?
- j45 4mo agoThis has Magic School Bus episode written all over it.
- Chaseraph 4mo agoDang, all I found was a used condom when I did this.
- nstents 4mo agoHaving lived in Italy for 7 years as a teen, the word is that construction of commercial, governmental, and private sites will be shut down for sometimes years so the Italian government and bureaucracy can have its go in deciding what action to take. A Roman era catacomb was found when my sister's school was being expanded, and the Nuns running the school managed to hush it up pretty well. I imagine they explained to the working crew their loss of a job if word got out.. It seems reasonable a similar thing happened here even as far back as the 1870s when the original construction was taking place.
- csomar 4mo agoSimilar thing in Tunisia where if ruins are found, the government will own the site. Theoretically, it should compensate the owners for their loss, but practically they pay peanuts. So if people find ruins in their lands, they just hide it/throw it/bury it.
- mothballed 4mo agoThere is a phrase "Shoot, shovel, shutup" used in the US whenever anything is found on private property (usually endangered animals) that the government has an interest in protecting/restricting. The owners will destroy it immediately and before anyone finds out so that they don't lose their property rights. Thus you have the unintended consequences that these regulations accelerate rather than mitigate their destruction.
- ourmandave 4mo agoWell that's not going to work on bigger animals (e.g. buffalo) as you can only carry back 100 lbs at per hunt.
- khazhoux 4mo agoThe plan also fails miserably with elephants, giraffes, and rhinos.
- Febriss33 4mo agohad you ever been to rome? totally normal.. there is an entire hill made of roman pottery waste.. is a public park! best city ever
- edwinjm 4mo agoSurprised that Smithsonian magazine makes such an awful website. Every minute, new ads are loaded, shifting the text up and down, making it hard to read.
- lqstuart 4mo agoI feel like the real news story is kids protesting against school being closed
- justinclift 4mo agoThis is like the physical version of exploring a legacy codebase. ;)
- letstools 4mo ago[flagged]
- yesitcan 4mo agoClickbait title > The students who found a way into the ruins weren’t the first amateur explorers to rediscover the site. Some of the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the villa dates to between 1920 and 1950, when the building was occupied by a religious order. Other markings are more recent, perhaps left by students at the high school
- giuseony 4mo agoIt's pretty much like this everywhere in Italy. I'm originally from southern Italy and my father worked as a laborer for a local municipality. About 20 years ago, during excavation work to rebuild a wall, he personally unearthed some pottery that turned out to be the contents of a Magna Graecia storehouse dating back roughly 3,000 years. Another time, more recently, on the outskirts of my hometown, during roadwork to repave a sidewalk, a Greek tomb dating back approximately 2,400 years was discovered. The lands around the Mediterranean have been inhabited for so long that wherever you dig, you're very likely to find some kind of artifact.
- alsetmusic 4mo agoA caption for one of the photos: > A room with monochrome stucco decorations Cantieri Narranti Unlikely. We know that the white marble statues that we have were once painted. Time turned them into what we see today. This room was surely vividly painted.
- wolvoleo 4mo agoThis sounds so Stranger Things lol. At least they didn't find a Demogorgon
- greenoracle9 4mo ago[flagged]