One archaeologist’s backwater is another archaeologist’s bustling waterway. Well, that’s what a new paper published about Interamna Lirenas, an ancient town in Italy, seems to suggest, anyways.
The paper, which is included in Oxbow Books’ Roman Urbanism in Italy: Recent Discoveries and New Directions reveals that the riverside town was a popular port, and a surprisingly resilient settlement, surviving what was traditionally seen as a period of Roman stagnation.
“We started with a site so unpromising that no one had ever tried to excavate it. That’s very rare in Italy,” says Alessandro Launaro, the paper’s author and an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, according to a press release. “There was nothing on the surface, no visible evidence of buildings, just bits of broken pottery. But what we discovered wasn’t a backwater, far from it. We found a thriving town adapting to every challenge thrown at it for 900 years.”
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