Rome's Lost Empire

Courtesy of the BBC and Discovery, shown here in the UK on December 9th. Wrong on so many levels.
Let's just start with the title. What precisely is 'lost'? Apparently, anything and everything. Quite used to this sort of piece, downplaying what we already know, so that any fact can be presented as an amazing new discovery. Usually prepared to go along with it for the sake of some nicely filmed (and/or 3D-reconstructed) travelogue of sites and you never know there might be a nugget of something new. This, however, is a particularly egregious example.

Except for wanting to piggy-back on Simon Keay's work at Portus, it was entirely unclear why they kept coming back here. Was any of this new? An amphitheatre was discovered in 2009 (is this the same one?). The site of the lighthouse underneath the scrap yard has been known since 2007. I might take more convincing that what little we were shown can be turned into a canal all the way to Rome. Was the graphic artist consciously thinking of Barad-dur and the Eye of Sauron at the end there...?

So to Dacia. And here we touch on two of my areas of interest, so things get even worse. The lidar plot was great. Would love to see more (would love to know who actually processed it, as our intrepid space archaeologist seemed to have developed an entirely new skill set in seconds flat). Although I haven't seen those features so well mapped before, I'm quite sure that patently obvious bank and ditch hadn't excaped the notice of the local archaeologists until our dynamic duo arrived. There's a quite similar plan in Stefan 2005 Guerres Daciques de Domitien et de Trajan.

The desert around Petra was quite well settled? What a revelation. The limes Tripolitanus was used to regulate the passage of people in and out of the empire? Who'd have thought. Twenty sites up and down the valley? I count about ten on the large scale Pelagios mapping. Poor.

I don't think it did Sarah Parcak any favours, either. The programme didn't really set out to explain what it was she actually did, or how she did it (except to 'find' things that didn't appear to be lost in the first place). I was quite impressed with the previous documentary on her work on Egypt. Now I'm left wondering how much of that was really new at all...

Binchester in Britannia

The inscription from Binchester (mentioned once or twice before) is now published in Britannia 43 (2012), 399 No. 6.

I see the reading sacel(lum) has disappeared and we're back to sacer (which is what it looked like to me all along). I'm not sure about Tertullo e]t Sacer(dote) cos; even if the consular date of 158 is attractive, the preceding fragment doesn't look like the bottom of a T to me. But it is hard to find another context in Imperial nomenclature or the name of the relevant unit (which ought to precede the formulation cui praest...praefectus equitum). We might go for Elagabalus, who was styled sacerdos amplissimus dei invicti solis, but the only example of this from Britain (RIB1465 from Chesters) is a restoration of a mutilated (post damnatio) text. The fragmentary RIB 1915 from Birdoswald contained another possible sace]rdo but is now even more fragmentary than when initially recorded and little help.

A legionary of Legio XI in Britain?

Details of the following inscription apparently found at Marton in Lincolnshire have recently been added to the county Historic Environment Record:

The text is straightforward:
Marti sanc|to sacrum | C(aius) Iul(ius) Anto|ninus mil(es) | [le]g(ionis) XI Cl(audiae) | [e]x voto posu|uit

the context less so. The legio XI Claudia is otherwise unattested in Britain and for most of its existence served in the Danubian provinces. How a serving soldier of that legion comes to be making a dedication to Mars at a rural settlement on the western fringe of Lincolnshire is the immediate, and potentially very interesting, question. Except... the provenance is a little suspect. Apparently found at the edge of a field by someone walking along the lane, reported to Retford museum (at least), but since sold at auction for several thousand pounds.

Could this be a case of a manufactured provenance for an eastern European artefact allowing it to be sold on legitimately in the UK? Seems a large object to transport, but then if it can be worth £3500 you might go to the effort. Mind you if the story I hear is true, then the 'finder' sold it on to someone else who then got the £3500 at auction so either the plot becomes more convoluted, or the initial sale wasn't as lucrative as all that.

Is there any reason to think it real (or really from Marton)? The lane is on the line of a Roman road (leading to the Trent crossing at Littleborough); there is a Roman fort just to the south and a Romano-British settlement just to the north. The fort is assumed to be early and temporary (all that is known is the cropmark of an enclosing ditch); the settlement is more long-lived (quite possibly there first). Legio XI was on the Rhine from about AD70 to the end of the first century and reinforcements from that source not out of the question but we still don't have a good context for an ex voto dedication to Mars just here...