Nearly two millennia ago, a wealthy Roman commissioned an intricate, multicolored floor mosaic that depicted two beloved household animals: a cat named Emerald and a dog named Ocean. The mosaic was a key feature of a villa, which archaeologists recently unearthed from beneath the ancient city of Adramytteion on Turkey's Aegean coast.

Within the Roman villa, which has been dated to the late second to third centuries A.D., archaeologists discovered three halls surrounding a central atrium. In one room, which likely functioned as the villa's main reception hall, archaeologists found a colorful mosaic with 15 separate panels depicting living and mythological creatures.

In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Mosaic Research, archaeologist Hüseyin Özgen, head of the Adramytteion research team at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, wrote that the 15 panels are centered around what appears to be a depiction of Medusa, while the named cat and dog may preserve the memory of household creatures.

Özgen began excavating at Adramytteion in 2012, but he and his team discovered the Roman villa only recently and excavated it in 2025 and early 2026. In the Roman period, Adramytteion was a provincial capital within Asia Minor and a prime trading spot due to its location at the head of a gulf on the Aegean Sea. The impressive villa included three mosaic-paved halls, a number of secondary rooms, and a network of pipes and drains that may have connected to a latrine.

Visitors approaching from the courtyard of the villa would have been greeted by the largest, most elaborate mosaic in the residence, according to Özgen. Located in the middle of the room, the mosaic measures about 16.4 by 11.8 feet (5 by 3.6 meters) and contains 15 panels arranged in three rows. Most of the panels depict birds, fish and felines, but two mythologically inspired panels include a gorgon (possibly Medusa) and a winged horse (possibly Pegasus). Ancient artists used white, black, red, orange, yellow, pink, burgundy, blue, turquoise and green tiles to create the intricate design.

Only two of the animals depicted in the mosaic are named. As someone entered the room, the first mosaic panel they would have seen to their left was a pale cat seated on a blue-green cushion, Özgen wrote in the study. Above the cat are the Greek letters ΖΜΑΡΑΓΔΙΝ (Zmaragdin), meaning emerald. The relaxed cat sitting on a cushion suggests that Emerald may have been a pet rather than a stray.

One possible explanation for Emerald's name may be a link to the desert of Roman Egypt, where emeralds were mined in antiquity; the villa owner may have been a merchant with North African connections.

On the right side as someone entered the room was a mosaic panel depicting a running or leaping dog. This animal is labeled with the Greek letters ΩΚΕΑΝΟΣ (Okeanos), meaning ocean. Adramytteion was a harbor city, so Ocean's name may have been bestowed due to his surroundings, according to Özgen.

Emerald and Ocean were likely familiar to the villa's residents, even if they weren't specifically pets, Özgen wrote, and their depictions in the mosaic may have functioned as familiar signs of ownership and household identity.

Research at Adramytteion by Özgen and the project team is ongoing.

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The Romans are well known for their aqueducts, which brought water to their cities and settlements.

These aqueducts sometimes ran for very long distances. For instance, the aqueduct of Valens, which brought water to the city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), was 250 miles (400 kilometers) long, according to a statement from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

The aqueducts also lasted a long time; their remains are some of the most prominent Roman architectural finds visible today. All of this demonstrates the Romans' engineering prowess. So how did the Romans build such large and long-lasting aqueducts?

Preparing the route

First, the Romans would select a source of water for the aqueduct, with springs being a popular choice. The aqueducts had to be designed so water would flow toward the city or settlement. The successful building of the aqueducts "was accomplished by an ever slight incline downwards from the spring to its end source," such as Rome, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, a classics professor and chair emerita at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, told Live Science in an email.

Roman surveyors had to design a route carefully. "To choose a route with the necessary gradient, Roman surveyors would have either used the libra or the dioptra," Joseph Lewis, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science in an email.

The dioptra was shaped like a disc with a sighting bar in the middle. It could be suspended from a stand, and the surveyor could look through the sighting bar at rods in the ground to help determine their elevations. "Surveyors would sight through the sighting bar toward surveying staves to measure differences to elevation," Lewis said.

The exact design of the libra is unclear, but we know that it had a plumb bob that was suspended in the air and the surveyor could compare it to rods in the ground to help determine differences in ground height. "Surveyors would set the libra up along proposed routes for the aqueduct and look forward and backward against calibrated staves," Lewis explained, noting that this allowed them to determine differences in ground height.

Building a long-lasting aqueduct

The Romans used a form of concrete that tended to last much longer than modern-day concrete. Roman concrete used pozzolan, an ashy substance, that was combined with lime and water to form a durable concrete that hardened when exposed to water.

"Roman concrete certainly played an important role, especially in bridges, arcades, and other structural elements," Giovanni De Feo, a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Salerno in Italy, said in an email.

But this wasn't the only factor that allowed Roman aqueducts to last such a long time.

"I believe their remarkable preservation results from a combination of factors," De Feo said. For example, the Romans were careful to select routes that followed stable geological formations.

Regular maintenance that, in many cases, continued into the Middle Ages also helped Roman aqueducts survive the test of time, De Feo noted. This means that they tried to avoid volcanoes and other landscapes that were unstable.

Aqueducts did not always run aboveground; sometimes, they had lengthy underground portions in areas where the landscapes made it difficult to place it aboveground. Some "aqueducts had hardly any stretches above ground outside the city, while others ran on arches for a considerable distance," Gerda de Kleijn, a researcher at Radboud University in the Netherlands, wrote in her book "The Water Supply of Ancient Rome" (J.C. Gieben, 2001).

As the water neared the city, it would sometimes go into pools that helped remove dirt and other visible pollutants. "Water would pool into the basin, sediment would sink to the bottom, then the water would continue from there on its course to the distribution tank," Harry Evans, a professor emeritus of classics at Fordham University, said in an email.

The number of workers required to build an aqueduct depended on its size and timeline for completion. The Hadrianic aqueduct at Athens, which runs for about 12.4 miles (20 km), could have been completed in 15 years by a team of around 500 workers, researchers estimated in a 2022 paper.

Maintaining the aqueduct

After an aqueduct was built, regular maintenance kept it in good shape. Cees Passchier, head of tectonophysics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, has studied a Roman aqueduct at Divona in France. In a 2023 study, Passchier and colleagues found that carbonate would have built up on the aqueduct over time. Maintenance workers "partly scraped away" the carbonate before replastering the aqueduct, Passchier told Live Science in an email. At some other aqueducts, they wouldn't bother scraping but would "simply plaster over the carbonate without ever cleaning anything," he said.

A sizable number of workers would have been needed to keep aqueducts functional, but it varied based on the aqueduct's size. For "a small place like Divona, a workforce of a dozen people would probably have been enough," Passchier said. "We know that in Rome, there was a staff of a few hundred people to keep the aqueducts working."

Even after the Roman Empire collapsed, many of its aqueducts survived, as some were used and maintained into the Middle Ages and even into modern times. One of the aqueducts, the Aqua Virgo, built in 19 B.C., is still bringing water to Rome today.

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Archaeologists excavating in eastern Serbia have discovered the remains of a lavish and uniquely constructed Roman bath that once belonged to an emperor. The suite of rooms ‪—‬ which included heated floors, three bathing pools and a sauna ‪—‬ was uncovered at the bottom of a tower within an imperial palace, a design archaeologists had never seen before in the Roman Empire.

The bath complex, known in Latin as a balneum, was found at the archaeological site of Vrelo-Šarkamen, a monumental fortified residential complex that was built in the early fourth century and was occupied by Maximinus Daza (or Daia), who was Roman emperor from 310 to 313. Archaeologists have been excavating at Vrelo-Šarkamen on and off for decades, and the latest discovery was made by a research team from the Institute of Archaeology, an independent research institution in Serbia, according to a Sept. 3 statement.

Galerius Valerius Maximinus, born in what is now Serbia and originally named Daza, was one of the four Roman "tetrarchs." In A.D. 293, Emperor Diocletian essentially split the Roman Empire into two halves — Eastern and Western — and each was administered by a senior emperor and a junior ruler. By 305, the rulers of the Roman Empire were Constantius and Galerius as senior emperors and Severus and Maximinus Daza as junior rulers, but the tetrarchy had begun to fall apart. Maximinus claimed the title of senior emperor in 301 but lasted only three years. He died in 313 after losing a civil war against his rival, Licinius.

The new excavations at Maximinus Daza's imperial residence have revealed that the palace was even more complex and luxurious than previously thought, according to the statement.

Maximinus' palace had a monumental tower in the southwest corner. But archaeologists were surprised to find a circular bath complex on the lowest level of the tower, as most ancient balnea were oriented linearly, with rooms in a row. This bath area had a domed ceiling with six windows, which shows a high level of engineering knowledge, according to the statement.

The balneum was split into two sections: one for equipment needed to run the baths and one for bathing and relaxing. Within the equipment room, archaeologists found the furnace that heated the bath's floors. They also discovered the base for a copper boiler that would have been used to heat up bath water. However, the copper boiler itself is now missing.

Within the suite of rooms that the emperor used, archaeologists found three bathing pools or tubs, along with a sudatorium, the Latin word for a steam bath or sauna.

According to the statement, "the complex was not simply a space intended for personal hygiene, but a carefully designed private bath intended for high-status residents of the palace, in which architecture, technical infrastructure and comfort formed a single functional whole."

Researchers will continue to explore the bath complex to better understand how the rooms were structured and how Emperor Maximinus and his family accessed it.

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Archaeologists in Bulgaria have discovered a human skeleton inside a giant Roman jar. It's likely that the individual sought shelter in the vessel during an enemy attack over 1,600 years ago but died as a fire swept through the area.

The team unearthed the gigantic jar in a Late Roman turret, or small tower, in the Roman colony of Deultum on Aug. 10. It's unclear which battle led to the individual's death, but Deultum faced many attacks from East Germanic tribes and Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries, lead excavator Lyudmil Vagalinski, an archaeologist at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email.

The individual's remains were found with two iron knives and a belt inside the container, a type of jar known as a dolium. These huge vessels were the largest type of pottery in antiquity (from roughly the eighth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D.) and were used to store goods such as olive oil and wine. The largest dolia could hold more than 260 gallons (1,000 liters), although the surviving lower part of the newfound dolium was smaller, measuring approximately 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter, Vagalinski said.

Even though Vagalinski and his colleagues had been excavating the turret, which is the northern turret of Deultum's western Roman gate, they weren't expecting to find human remains there, according to Standart News, the Bulgarian outlet that first covered the finding.

"We were surprised," Vagalinski said in an email. It's very rare for archaeologists to discover human remains inside the cities of antiquity except in the case of "extraordinary circumstances" ‪—‬ like earthquakes, enemy attacks or volcanic eruptions, he said. Even in these cases, survivors would search for their dead to bury them beyond the city walls, but they often didn't know that there were dead bodies under the ruins.

The recent discovery seems to represent one of those "extraordinary circumstances," Vagalinski said. The team found a significant amount of burned materials around the dolium, including ashes and coals; broken bricks, tiles and shards; blackened walls; melted glass fragments; and bones from domestic animals. The likely scenario is that, upon hearing of an imminent attack, people brought their livestock into the fortress. The archaeologists also found many bronze coins that were probably lost in the chaos.

The individual, presumably a young man, was likely part of this tumult and climbed into the dolium to hide or seek shelter, Vagalinski said. And while it's unknown how the fire started, the presence of ashes under the skeleton in the dolium indicates that the individual went inside after the fire had already begun, Vagalinski said.

The team's preliminary analysis dates the event to approximately A.D. 400, though they'll have a more precise date after they process the rest of their field data, according to Vagalinski.

The young man was likely hiding from the raging fire in the empty dolium and held an iron knife between his legs to defend himself in case the attackers found him, Vagalinski explained. He had a second knife in his belt.

"In any case, he made no attempt to get out of the ceramic vessel," Vagalinski said. The team determined this based on the individual’s position, similar to that of a sleeping man. "After the attack, the inhabitants of the city leveled the ruins of the tower and covered them with a new, higher floor." They did not know that a fellow citizen was lying at the bottom of the dolium.

The skeletal remains have been moved to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where they will be analyzed by a physical anthropologist, according to Vagalinski. Next summer, the team will head back to Deultum to try to unearth the entire western Late Roman gate, which dates to approximately A.D. 300. The researchers are "eager to reveal its whole plan and proper chronology," Vagalinski said. They also aim to complete the investigation of the gate's northern turret, where they found the dolium.

Earlier this year, the team discovered an older latrina, the Latin word for toilet, dating to between the second and third centuries, near the gate.

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Ancient slingstones found in northeastern Spain may be evidence of a local uprising against Roman rule in the first century B.C.

Archaeologists think the lead sling "bullets" were fired by Roman soldiers after an ambush orchestrated by the local Indigenous Ceretani (also spelled Cerretani) people, who by this time had spent almost 200 years resisting Roman expansion in Iberia.

The findings, which were unearthed during an archaeological survey of the area, reinforce that "the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was neither a brief nor a peaceful process," researchers explained in a statement from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

The ancient Roman historian Cassius Dio (who lived from around A.D. 150 to 235) wrote that the Ceretani revolt took place in 39 B.C., but it was generally thought to have occurred farther west. The new finds, however, pinpoint an ancient Roman military camp in what's now Cerdanya, a region of the eastern Pyrenees on the Spanish side of the modern border with France. At the time, this location was in Ceretani territory.

Roman expansion

The archaeological team found the sling bullets last year among the remains of the camp at Collet de Jovell, an alpine pass in the region. The bullets were poured from lead (it was easier than collecting stones), and two were emblazoned with the letters CND, which stood for the Roman governor of the province of Hispania at that time, Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus. These letters help date the ambush to exactly 39 B.C., when he was in office.

The archaeologists also unearthed the distinctive iron studs that Roman legionaries wore on their sandals, called clavi caligae; Roman fibulae, or brooches for fastening clothing; and several Roman coins that reinforced the team's dating of the site.

The Romans started expanding in Iberia, known to them as Hispania, after first landing on the Mediterranean coast in 218 B.C., during the Second Punic War with Carthage. But they were opposed by the Ceretani and other Indigenous peoples.

The two sides battled for centuries. But the Ceretani revolt in 39 B.C. failed to oust the invaders and was followed by severe Roman repression of the local people, according to the statement.

The Romans suffered, too ‪—‬ the governor ordered that some of his troops be punished for running away when the Ceretani ambushed the camp.

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Archaeologists in Slovakia have uncovered a large Roman military camp likely used by Marcus Aurelius' troops during conflicts with Germanic tribes in the late second century. The "extremely rare" camp came as a surprise to archaeologists, as it holds the hastily buried remains of numerous soldiers in unusual graves, including wells.

Remains of the 18.2-acre (7.4 hectare) camp were found near the town of Šurany in southwestern Slovakia, according to a translated July 17 statement from MH Invest, which excavated the area along with the Institute of Archaeology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS).

"We have a unique opportunity to explore practically an entire Roman marching camp, which is extremely rare in the European context," Matej Ruttkay, director of the SAS Institute of Archaeology, said in the statement. "We are clearly investigating a place that disappeared immediately after the military conflict between the Romans and the Germans."

Between A.D. 166 and 180, the Romans fought a series of battles against a Germanic people called the Marcomanni, who lived north of the Danube River along the border of the Roman Empire in what are now Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Marcus Aurelius, who reigned as Roman emperor from 161 to 180, commanded troops in the Marcomannic Wars with the goal of defending and securing Rome's border against barbarian invasions. But the wars ended upon Marcus Aurelius' death, when his son Commodus negotiated a peace with the Marcomanni, according to third-century Roman historian Cassius Dio.

The newly discovered Roman military camp had clear defensive characteristics, including five entrance gates, fortifications, and a curved ditch-and-rampart system typical of marching or legionary camps, according to the statement. The Šurany camp is only the second Roman military installation ever found in western Slovakia; the first camp, discovered in 2024 by SAS archaeologists, is thought to be where Marcus Aurelius wrote part of his Meditations.

The Šurany camp surprised archaeologists with a large number of skeletons — and parts of skeletons — buried in ditches, wells and hastily dug shallow graves, according to the statement.

"Our preliminary findings indicate that in most cases these are Roman soldiers," Marek Vojteček, an archaeologist at the SAS Institute of Archaeology, said in the statement. "Numerous components of Roman military equipment and weaponry were also found with the skeletal remains, such as spears, arrowheads, parts of helmets, segmented and scale armor, legionary brooches, coins, and the characteristic 'caligae' military sandals, from which iron nails on the soles have been preserved," he said.

X-ray analysis of blocks of clay revealed the intact sandal nails, which are now stored at the SAS Institute of Archaeology's specialized laboratory for further analysis. "It is literally a miracle to see the original footwear of a Roman soldier and even to be able to determine its size," Michal Cheben, an archaeologist at the SAS Institute of Archaeology, said in the statement.

The unusual burials raise important questions about the use and abandonment of this Roman military camp, according to Cheben, including whether the soldiers died from combat injuries or disease and why the bodies weren't looted before being thrown into storage pits and wells. "Laboratory analyses and further genetic and anthropological research may provide answers," Cheben said.

Because the camp was so large and the artifacts so numerous, a comprehensive analysis of the site will take several years and will involve international experts in carbon dating, soil analysis, isotopic analysis and ancient DNA, according to the statement.

"This is a long-term process, so many results will only become known in the coming years," Ruttkay said.

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The face of a young woman crowned with a laurel wreath, buried in elaborate clothing and unusual cork sandals, has appeared nearly 1,700 years after her death.

She is one of 16 people from Aquincum, a Roman-era city in present-day Hungary, whose faces have been reconstructed for "Once We Were Like You," a new exhibition at the Aquincum Museum in Budapest. The display pairs skulls excavated in and around the ancient city with scientifically informed approximations of how their owners may have looked in life.

Six of the reconstructions are hyperrealistic silicone models, complete with artificial eyes, human hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and, in some cases, beards. The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 31, includes men, women and a child who lived during the region's period of Roman rule.

"The face is the most important feature for recognizing a person," Emese Gábor, a forensic facial reconstruction specialist who sculpted the silicone faces, told Live Science in an email. Although a skull cannot reveal every detail of a person's appearance, reconstruction lets museum visitors encounter the faces as those of "a real human being rather than as skeletal remains," she said.

Rebuilding a Roman face

Aquincum stood on the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire in what is now Budapest. The city was home to a diverse population in the first through fourth centuries, and genetic and archaeological analyses of the individuals in the exhibition point to connections with regions including present-day Italy, Scotland and Syria, as well as Sarmatian groups from the Eurasian steppe and Celtic communities that lived in the region before Roman rule.

The remains of those who lived here have also been unearthed, and continue to be discovered today during the excavation of cemeteries," according to a statement from the museum.

Creating a reconstructed face begins with a high-resolution 3D CT scan of the original skull. Specialists then produce an exact 3D-printed replica, allowing experts like Gábor to work without repeatedly handling or disturbing the ancient remains.

"The latest scientific advances — including 3D scanning, CT imaging, archaeogenetic (ancient DNA) analysis and facial approximation research — are incorporated whenever possible," she said.

"If a hyper-realistic reconstruction is required, I create a mould and cast the face in coloured silicone, finishing it with real human hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and, where appropriate, a beard," she said.

Ancient DNA can sometimes provide additional clues about pigmentation, including probable eye, hair and skin color. But the results are still approximations, not portraits. For instance, hairstyle, expression and many details of the person’s appearance are usually more speculative.

The woman with the laurel wreath

Of all the people she reconstructed, Gábor said she found it especially difficult to forget the woman known as the Jablonka Road mummy.

The woman's skeleton was relatively well preserved, but the soft tissue on her face had decayed, leaving only the skull. A laurel wreath still rested on her head, and, according to Gábor, her burial contained fine clothing, a spindle for weaving, bird-shaped cork sandals and a painted male portrait that had been placed near her feet. Archaeologists have suggested that the portrait may have represented her husband or father, although his identity is unknown.

"Based on these details, the archaeological context and the anthropological data, it was the archaeologists who pieced together her story while I reconstructed her face," Gábor said. "That was very moving."

Other individuals selected for the exhibition include those of a young girl who died in childhood and a woman interpreted as a nurse or healer who was buried in a children's cemetery. Some of the other reconstructions include a construction worker, a military officer and a blacksmith.

Two women appear to have met particularly violent or punitive ends. They were buried face down with their legs bound together, Gábor said. The exhibition's interpretation associates one woman with an accusation of witchcraft and the other with poisons, although such details are historical interpretations rather than evidence-based findings from the burials.

"Every reconstruction is a journey," Gábor said. "As I shape each face, I find myself reflecting on that person's life again and again, and by the end, they no longer feel like anonymous remains, but like real people."

Analyses of the skeletons suggest that many of the individuals endured strenuous physical labor, periods of hunger and chronic inflammation. This evidence led museum curators to conclude that many represented the less wealthy inhabitants of Roman society — people whose names and experiences were unlikely to appear in surviving written histories.

For Gábor, the physical reconstructions offer something that a digital image cannot: Visitors can stand face-to-face with a life-size person, walk around the model and study it from different angles. Her hope is that this encounter encourages visitors to think beyond the scientific data and imagine the full lives that once surrounded the excavated bones.

"When you see a face, you don't just see bones in a display," Gábor said. "You see a person — someone who was born, who grew up, who worked, who loved, who laughed, who struggled, who fought with challenges, who raised children. Some were sick. Not everyone died of illness. Some died in accidents. Some through violence. And eventually, all of them died. That sense of shared humanity helps spark empathy."

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Female farm managers are hidden in plain sight in ancient Roman texts, mentioned in laws, literature and grave inscriptions across five centuries. Modern historians have generally assumed they were housekeepers, in charge of domestic tasks and household meals, and segregated from the productive business of the farm.

My new paper, published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, challenges this assumption.

In fact, there is evidence to suggest that many Roman female farm managers supervised wine production and other processes vital to farming and profits.

A false lead

A farming manual written by the Roman writer Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella in the 1st century CE is a window to the roles of the female manager.

An upper class landowner himself, Columella lists the responsibilities of farm managers, who were probably enslaved. The male manager was termed the vilicus, and the female manager the vilica, terms derived from their roles at the "villa".

But many historians reading this text have been side-tracked by a false lead: Columella begins his section on the vilica with a long quote from the Greek philosopher Xenophon, who wrote in Athens more than four centuries earlier.

The "natural" role of women, according to Xenophon, was to work indoors. Therefore in his discussion, the ideal upper-class married woman is depicted staying inside her town house to supervise the domestic work of the slaves.

The Greek writer is not discussing farm workers. In fact, Columella says four times that these ideas are not his own, but those of Xenophon, writing long ago.

Columella lists a completely different set of responsibilities for the vilica on a Roman farm: most importantly, the making of wine and olive oil, which were highly valuable commodities — the backbone of landowners' profits.

In his description of the vilica's duties, Columella includes the extraction of the juice from grapes during the harvest; adding flavorings and preservatives such as salt, wormwood, fennel or boiled grape-juice; and overseeing successful fermentation into wine.

According to Columella, the vilica also managed the processing of other farm products to make them long-lasting and profitable, such as turning inedible olives into olive oil for sale.

From archaeology we know that production of wine or oil, using huge machines in substantial buildings, could reach 50,000 to 100,000 litres per year, or even more. The vilica was therefore responsible for overseeing large-scale work essential to the operation of the estate.

Calling on the gods

Correct sacrifices to the gods were seen as vital to the success of the farm. Archaeology has uncovered altars for offerings in Roman wine-making buildings.

Wine-making in the Roman world was a precarious process, due to uncontrolled temperatures, bacteria or oxygenation. Wine could easily go moldy or turn into vinegar.

A striking element of Columella's account is that he includes carrying out offerings to avert such a disaster in his instructions for the female farm manager.

Looking for more clues

Other texts contain barely more than a mention of the vilica, revealing only her presence.

But we can still put together some clues.

Legal writings on inheritance, quoting the 1st century BCE jurist Trebatius, include her in the instrumentum fundi — whatever (including enslaved personnel) is required for productive work, gathering and preserving produce of the estate.

Another aristocratic landowner and writer, Cato the Elder, living two centuries before Columella, lists both the female and the male farm manager as essential staff for a vineyard or olive farm.

He devotes only one small section to outlining the female farm manager's tasks, but a close look shows these are not predominantly domestic. Cato includes keeping poultry and processing of seasonal farm products. Although he does include supervision of cleaning, this could refer to maintenance of work spaces such as stables and wine making buildings, an integral part of estate management – and also listed by Columella among the vilica's duties.

Cato also gives the vilica the responsibility for making sacrifices to the gods for the success of the farm. She must regularly offer garlands at the altar "for abundance", he writes.

A Roman mosaic showing estate work in different seasons depicts a scene of sacrifices for abundant crops to the god Jupiter (in his Celtic form as a sky and weather god). A woman is shown holding an offering of garlands, just as Cato instructs. Beside her are a jug for wine offerings and a male figure.

Perhaps this mosaic shows the vilica and vilicus, both essential to the success of annual harvests. While such images of female figures are rare, one fragmentary wall painting from Rome shows a female overseeing wine-making workers, just as Columella describes.

This combined body of evidence suggests we should expand outdated understandings of the roles that Roman women played in farm production, the dominant sector of ancient economies.

No vilica has left us an account of her work in her own words. But by paying careful attention to the evidence, we can hear an echo of her voice.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Nearly 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius buried a vast collection of scrolls in ash and scorched them into solid black lumps. Now, without unrolling them, researchers have virtually read two of them —‬ and uncovered what may be a work by a well-known Stoic philosopher.

The breakthrough comes from the Vesuvius Challenge, an international research effort to digitally read the scrolls that were preserved when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by ash and pumice in A.D. 79. Papyrologists, who study and preserve the ancient manuscripts, announced June 25 that they had digitally unwrapped the surviving portion of one scroll, known as PHerc. 1667, revealing roughly 5 feet (1.5 meters) of continuous Greek text across 20 columns. Researchers also recovered more than 70 columns of text from a second scroll, PHerc. 172.

"For nearly two millennia, many of these texts have been physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible," Brent Seales, Vesuvius Challenge co-founder and a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, said in a statement. "Today ‪—‬ after years of interdisciplinary work combining advanced imaging, artificial intelligence, academic research and an innovation contest ‪—‬ we are finally able to read them."

Over the past few years, Seales and his team have used a synchrotron to essentially X-ray inside the scrolls and detect the ink ancient Romans used to write. The letters are then studied by papyrologists, who translate the text.

Part of PHerc. 1667 was physically opened in the 1980s, but overlapping layers obscured the writing so badly that the scroll was given a readability score of zero, Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, said in the statement.

The handwriting and text of PHerc. 1667 suggest the scroll dates to the second or third century B.C., making it one of the oldest scrolls in the Herculaneum collection. This early date means it could not have been authored by Philodemus of Gadara, the first-century-B.C. Epicurean philosopher whose writings dominated the Herculaneum library.

Experts think the text reads more like a Stoic treatise on ethics and human behavior, and it specifically mentions Aristocreon, the nephew and pupil of the influential Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. Very little of Chrysippus' own writing has survived, so if the attribution holds up, it would be a significant addition to the historical record of early Stoic thought.

In a separate discovery, researchers identified a new book title within scroll PHerc. 139. The end of the scroll references Philodemus' eighth book of "On Gods." While this treatise had previously been known to exist, the new discovery reveals the work extended across at least eight volumes. Experts plan to reexamine other texts in the Herculaneum collection for additional volumes that may belong to the same series.

More than 600 Herculaneum scrolls remain unopened. It's thought that the villa was once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

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A clandestine excavation on the outskirts of Rome has brought to light a "splendid villa" that may have belonged to a member of the Antonine imperial family, according to archaeologists with the Special Superintendency of Rome. The remains of the first-century villa, which was previously unknown to archaeologists, include frescoed walls and mosaic floors that showcase the elite social status of the owners.

The villa was discovered at Castel di Guido, a village about 12 miles (19 kilometers) west of the ancient city walls of Rome. In ancient times, the area was known as Lorium, and it was frequented by prestigious Roman families, including the Roman emperors Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.

In February, the local police were alerted to illegal excavations at Castel di Guido on government-owned land, according to a June 15 translated statement from the Italian Ministry of Culture's Special Superintendency of Rome. The unauthorized excavations had been undertaken with a backhoe, which made deep cuts into the villa and left huge piles of dirt.

Superintendency archaeologists led by Alessia Contino carried out emergency excavations to document and stabilize the architecture at the site.

"Thanks to the local report and prompt intervention, it was possible to identify part of a large, previously unknown Imperial-period villa and uncover a splendid array of decorations, as well as the discovery of a statue in fine white marble," Contino said in the statement.

The excavation revealed the atrium at the entrance of the villa, two rooms decorated with frescoes and mosaics, and several other spaces related to the agricultural activities of the large, rural house. The villa was likely built in the early first century and abandoned in the third century.

The atrium's central impluvium — a marble basin in the center of many ancient Roman houses that collected rainwater from an opening in the roof — was surrounded by a floor decorated with bands of black-and-white botanical and geometric mosaics. The rear wall of the room, about 5 feet (1.5 meters) of which was still preserved, was painted red as part of a fresco that featured multicolor panels with human figures and botanical elements.

Surrounding the large room were four smaller ones, three of which still have preserved mosaic floors. One room includes nine black-and-white geometric panels, another includes black octagons on a white background, and the third has black rectangles.

Within the villa's central basin, archaeologists found a broken statue, about 31 inches (80 centimeters) tall, depicting a bearded man wearing a short tunic and carrying a basket with birds and fruit. The statue may represent Silvanus, the Roman deity of woods and other uncultivated lands, who watched over domesticated flocks of animals. Silvanus was also a companion of Bacchus (known in Greek as Dionysus), the god of wine and ecstasy.

The scale of the villa and the quality of the mosaics and frescoes suggest that the villa's owners were Roman aristocrats and may have even been members of the imperial family, according to the statement. In the Roman Empire, elite families like the Aurelii and the Arrii — the paternal and maternal families of Antoninus Pius, who reigned from A.D. 138 to 161 — lived in Lorium. Ancient sources suggest that Antoninus Pius spent his childhood in Lorium, built his imperial palace there, and died there at age 74.

Lorium was also frequented by Emperor Hadrian, who adopted Antoninus Pius to make him his heir, and by Marcus Aurelius, who was Antoninus Pius' nephew, adopted son and son-in-law. Because of Lorium's strong connection to the Antonine imperial dynasty, numerous villas and ancient estates have previously been discovered in the region.

But the newly uncovered villa "is another important piece of the puzzle," Contino said, "opening up new perspectives for understanding and preserving our history-rich territory."

Further work on the villa and its artifacts will help archaeologists date the building more accurately and work out whether it was abandoned when the imperial household was relocated out of Lorium, according to the statement.

Although work on the villa has not been completed, the public has a chance to visit the newly excavated villa and its mosaics on June 20 through a free archaeological hike and guided tour organized by the Special Superintendency of Rome.

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