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...