ARCHAEOLOGY March - April 2015

From the mid-first to the fifth century A.D., the site of Novae in the province of Moesia (now Bulgaria) served as a military outpost of the Roman Empire. Novae flourished throughout its history, with all the trappings of a busy provincial camp, including workshops, a hospital, barracks, administrative buildings, latrines, temples, altars, and monumental defensive walls and towers. Over the last five decades, researchers have uncovered these structures and countless artifacts. Most recently, archaeologists from the University of Warsaw have been excavating in what may have been the house of the centurion (a Roman officer) of the Legion I Italica, first raised by the emperor Nero and deployed to Novae in A.D. 69. The team, led by Piotr Dyczek, uncovered three second-century bronze figurines, two depicting speakers dressed in togas…

The early Christian claim that Jesus of Nazareth was God completely changed the course of Western civilization. For that reason, the question of how Jesus became God is one of the most significant historical questions and, in fact, a question that some believers have never thought to ask. What exactly happened, such that Jesus came to be considered God? To ask this question is to delve into a fascinating, multilayered historical puzzle—one that offers a richly illuminating look into the origins of the Western worldview and the theological underpinnings of our civilization. In the 24 provocative lectures of How Jesus Became God, Professor Bart D. Ehrman of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill takes you deeply into the process by which the divinity of Jesus was first conceived by…

Krakow, one of Poland’s oldest cities, is well-known for its churches, but it also hosts the country’s most significant collection of Jewish monuments and buildings. At the end of the fifteenth century, the city’s Jewish population was driven out of the center and directed to settle in the district of Kazimierz. Known as the Oppidum Iudaeorum, or “Jewish City,” it grew into a religious and cultural center for the region’s Jews. By the 1930s more than 60,000 lived there, but the Nazi occupation rendered the district a virtual ghost town. Recently scholars, historians, and archaeologists have taken a new interest in the area. Dariusz Niemiec of the Institute of Archaeology of the Jagiellonian University and a team of students are excavating in and around the Old Synagogue, the country’s oldest…

The archaeological record frequently offers impressive indications of the human impulse to move forward. It often is the details of those efforts that prove to be the most amazing. Such is the case with Portus, Rome’s monumental Mediterranean port complex. Archaeologist and writer Jason Urbanus brings us “Rome’s Imperial Port” (page 26), the story of the centuries-long progression from city to empire through the lens of one of the most impressive engineering and logistical projects ever undertaken. Much of what we think we know about the Viking presence in the British Isles comes from historical accounts that they arrived, bent on violence, in A.D. 793 and attacked the monastery at Lindisfarne. In “The Vikings in Ireland” (page 46), contributing editor Roger Atwood writes of new evidence coming from a handful of…

THE AIA AND SCS released a dedicated meeting app at the New Orleans meeting. T e app, available for iOS, Android, and web, enabled meeting attendees to navigate the program and create customized schedules. T e app included both the AIA and SCS programs, venue maps, information about the exhibit hall, messaging capabilities, and general information about the conference. Feedback from meeting attendees was overwhelmingly positive. If you were unable to attend but would like to get a detailed look at the meeting’s offerings, the app remains live and can be accessed at www.archaeological.org/meeting/app…

A team of archaeologists at a 2,000-year-old limestone quarry in Lebanon’s Bekka Valley recently excavated around a megalith weighing approximately 1,000 tons and dubbed Hajjar al-Hibla, or “stone of the pregnant woman.” It was intended for the Temple of Jupiter, which sits on three limestone blocks of similar size at the nearby site of Baalbek. To the team’s shock, they unearthed yet another block, this one weighing an estimated 1,650 tons, making it the largest known megalith. The German Archaeological Institute’s Margarete van Esse says excavation was suspended when the trench became dangerously deep. “Hopefully in a following campaign we can dig down to the bottom of the block,” she adds. The team wants to find clues there that will show how the megaliths were transported.…