Alessandro Sebastiani - Roman Archaeology UB

10/10/2026

10/10/2026

Today, we mourn the loss of Chris Wickham.

I first met Chris during my years as a student in Siena, when he would come to give seminars on medieval archaeology, alongside some of the great figures who shaped the discipline.

Over the years, a few exchanges of emails with him helped me see the world of castles, and the Early and Later Middle Ages, from a completely different perspective. He reminded me that, however much we archaeologists may obsess over the smallest fragments of pottery, it takes truly exceptional minds to build interpretative models capable of spanning entire continents.

His books and essays will remain as the intellectual legacy of an extraordinary scholar, but I will also remember a remarkably kind, courteous, elegant, and sophisticated man.

Meeting him in person at a wedding dinner was perhaps the best opportunity I ever had to discover the man behind the scholar. Between one course and the next, we found ourselves discussing many views and opinions we shared, exchanging thoughts and judgments that went well beyond archaeology.

Today, we lose another fundamental figure of the academic world in which I grew up, a world that shaped me and with which, at times, I also clashed.

An immense loss.

Rest in peace, Chris.

08/10/2026

A field guide to archaeologist-speak: what we say in the trench vs. what we actually mean. Guilty of all five. Which one are you? 👇

07/10/2026

How ancient are the Olympic Games we think we know?

The modern marathon debuted in 1896. The flame first burned in an Olympic stadium in 1928. The torch relay began in 1936, carrying a newly invented tradition from Olympia to Berlin, where the N**i regime turned the Games into propaganda.

Ancient Olympia was already much more than an athletic venue. The competitions formed part of a festival for Zeus, staged beside the temple that housed one of the Seven Wonders. Victory brought personal fame, but it also displayed religious devotion, Greek identity and collective prestige.

From sacred festival to global spectacle, sport has never entered the stadium alone.

Can the Olympic Games ever be politically neutral?

05/10/2026

What happens when architecture, materials and ritual are designed to make a human being feel small?

Pheidias’ Statue of Zeus at Olympia was not carved from one block. Gold and ivory covered a hidden wooden structure. Seated inside the Temple of Zeus, the god held Nike in one hand and a sceptre in the other. Ancient writers described an image so large that, if Zeus stood up, he would lift the roof.

The original is lost. We rebuild its appearance from Pausanias, coins of Elis and evidence from the workshop excavated at Olympia. None of those sources gives us the complete statue, and its final fate remains uncertain.

Which part would have shaped the encounter most: scale, materials or setting?

Wonder 3 of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

03/10/2026

What an archaeology professor actually eats, in everyday contexts only. 🍔🥗🍕🍗

No trench lunches here, just the heavily caffeinated reality between Rome and Buffalo. 🗺️

Catalogue entries open to peer review. 📝

01/10/2026

Two months to go.

On 7 December 2026, The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Classical Houses and Households will finally be published by Routledge. Preorders are now open.

Edited with Bradley A. Ault, the volume brings together 27 chapters devoted to the archaeology of houses and households across the ancient Mediterranean, moving from Early Iron Age Greece through the Greek and Roman worlds and into Late Antiquity. Alongside major sites such as Olynthos, Delos, the Palatine, Ostia and Dura-Europos, the book looks at construction, domestic cult, gender, furniture, decoration and the changing forms of domestic life over more than a millennium.

It has been a long editorial project, involving an extraordinary group of scholars, and seeing the finished volume now feels particularly satisfying. And yes, I have to admit that I really love the cover.

Coming 7 December 2026. Preorder now.

routledge

30/09/2026

Babylon did not become a political symbol only in antiquity.

Under Saddam Hussein, the ancient city was reconstructed as a stage for modern power. New walls rose above archaeological remains. Bricks bearing Saddam’s name echoed the stamped bricks of Nebuchadnezzar II. A new palace looked down over the ruins.

The result forces a difficult question: when a dictatorship rewrites an ancient site, should its intervention later be removed, preserved or interpreted?

Swipe through this Deep Dive on archaeology, reconstruction and political memory.

25/09/2026

The Hanging Gardens are the only Wonder without a confirmed location.

Later Greek and Roman accounts describe planted terraces, vaulted supports and water raised from a river. Yet Nebuchadnezzar II’s known inscriptions do not securely mention the Gardens, and excavations at Babylon have produced no identification accepted with confidence.

Stephanie Dalley proposed a different answer: Sennacherib’s Nineveh. Assyrian texts, garden reliefs and the water system that includes the Jerwan aqueduct document a real royal garden and ambitious hydraulic engineering. Whether that garden became the Wonder remembered by later writers is still debated.

Which case convinces you more: Babylon or Nineveh?

Next: Wonder 3, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia.

Main sources: Diodorus Siculus 2.10; Strabo 16.1.5; Berossus F8, preserved in Josephus, Against Apion 1.140–141; Stephanie Dalley, “Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens,” Iraq 56 (1994), 45–58; Julian Reade, “Alexander the Great and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” Iraq 62 (2000), 195–217.