A group of scientists from the University of Cambridge and the University of Ghent have made one of the most important discoveries of 2020. To go into detail, have mapped an ancient city located about 50 km from Rome through the use of ground penetrating radars (GPR).
The research has exposed data that brings to light how was this Roman city of approximately 30. 5 hectares, which was called Falerii Novi. Here you will see the results of the mapping done without lifting a single rock.
Falerii Novi, beech without digging thanks to technology
This was a walled city that was to the north of present-day Rome, clearly belonging to what was to date the Roman Empire. There is evidence that this place was already being inhabited by the year 241 BC, taking along its land complexes such as shops, a theater, a market, a temple, water pipe system, a monument, bathrooms and even a public swimming pool, according to the findings of the investigation.
This shows that Falerii Novi had more professional establishments with a better finish, architecturally speaking, than other cities of the same size throughout Italy, which allows archaeologists to make certain theories of how important this small metropolis in the Tber River valley was.
You will be wondering How did this group of scientists and archaeologists examine the entire subsoil where this walled city is located? Well, the archaeologist Martin Millet, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, together with his team of collaborators, They used a small off-road quad to which they anchored a kind of trailer. It is equipped with all these ground penetrating radars, which allow us to probe the subsoil at different depths and thus determine how the city evolved over the centuries.
According to a post from the Cambridge University blog, At Falerii Novi, we collected 71.7 million readings, each consisting of 400 temporary samples, which equates to 28.68 billion data points, approximately 4.5GB of raw data per hectare.. This, in general terms, indicates that the use of GPR no matter how good it is, possibly bring with it a series of new technological problems that will have to be solved to better accommodate the information transmitted by these radars.
Whatever happens, it must be clear that this has been a step more than important to the world of archeology and the world in general, this being the first step to use the GPR in large ancient cities such as Miletus in Turkey or Nicpolis in Greece, as Martin Millet commented for Antiquity.
