With the shrine of St. Peter, venerable, still vital, going back to the two roots of western civilization, pagan Rome (itself the transmitter of Greek culture) and Christianity, it is fitting that we should end our survey of what archaeology has to tell us about the culture to which ours owes so much. The two complexes, the grandiose pagan villa and the humble Christian shrine, which we have discussed in this chapter, are interrelated. The villa is one of the last manifestations of a culture that is played out, the shrine marks the beginning of a new culture that will produce its own grandiose monuments and in its turn be threatened by decline. In a sense, with the simplicity of St. Peter’s shrine the historical cycle returns to the simplicity of primitive Rome. But it is not simply a matter of returning to beginnings and starting over again; the new culture stands upon the shoulders of the old. The Christian shrine has the look of a pagan tomb-monument in the Isola Sacra necropolis; Constantine’s church has the look of a pagan Roman basilica. The language of the Mass is still Latin; the Pope is Pontifex Maximus. The striking thing is the continuity, and this is the most important lesson that archaeology has to teach. Again beneath St. Peter’s, as at so many other ancient sites, what the archaeologist digs up is not things but people. The remains in the niche under the Red Wall are not dry bones; they are live history. The breathing of life into that history is a major and largely unsung triumph of the modern science of archaeology, patiently at work over the last eighty years. To come to know a fragment of our past is to recognize a piece of ourselves. Perhaps, as archaeology interprets history, making the mute stones speak, we may come to know our past so well that we shall not be condemned to repeat it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER 1: Prehistoric Italy
R. J. C. Atkinson, Field Archaeology (London, 1946)
P. Barocelli, “Terremare, Palatino, orientazione dei castra e delle città romane,” Bulletino Communale 70 (1942), 131–144
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T. J. Peet, The Stone and Bronze Ages in Italy (Oxford, 1909)
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CHAPTER 2: The Etruscans
N. Alfieri, “The Etruscans of the Po and the Discovery of Spina,” Italy’s Life, No. 24 (1957), 91–104
—— and P. E. Arias, Spina (Florence, 1958)
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——, Etruscan Painting (Geneva, 1952)
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E. Pulgram, The Tongues of Italy (Cambridge, Mass., 1958)
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G. E. W. Wolstenholme and C. M. O’Connor, eds., Ciba Foundation Symposium on Medical Biology and Etruscan Origins (London and Boston, 1959). Important contributions by H. Hencken (29–47), and J. B. Ward Perkins (89–92), among others.
CHAPTER 3: Early Rome
F. E. Brown, “The Regia,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 12 (1935), 67–88
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——, “Early Rome I,” ib. 17 (1953)
——, “The Fortifications of Early Rome,” ib. 18 (1954), 50–65
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R. Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries (Boston, 1888)
G. Lugli, I monumenti antichi di Roma e suburbio, 3 (Rome, 1938), 23–50
——, Roma antica: il centro monumentale (Rome, 1946)
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S. B. Platner and T. Ashby, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1929)
S. M. Puglisi, “Gli abitatori primitivi del Palatino,” Mon. Ant. 41 (1951), cols. 1–98
L. Richardson, Jr., “Cosa and Rome: Comitium and Curia,” Archaeology 10 (1957), 49–55
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I. G. Scott, “Early Roman Traditions in the Light of Archeology,” Mem. Am. Acad. in Rome 7 (1929), 7–116
CHAPTER 4: Roman Colonies in Italy