The hill of Poggio Civitate is located immediately adjacent to the small mediaeval town of Murlo, c.25 km south of Siena (fig. 1). Situated at the juncture of Tuscany's mineralrich Colline metallifere and the agricultural abundance of the Crete senese, Poggio Civitate's inhabitants drew upon the area's vast resources to emerge as a regional center of power in the 8th through 6th c. B.C.

Excavation in 2015 at the Etruscan site revealed a previously undocumented phase of monumental domestic architecture. The building in question lies immediately west of the Piano del Tesoro plateau, in the modern property zone known as Civitate A. Its architectural form, as well as the materials recovered both upon and beneath its floor, suggest that it dates earlier than the architectural complex known on the adjacent plateau.

From the Julio-Claudian era until around the third quarter of the 3rd c. A.D., the amphorae that H. Dressel referred to as the Dressel 20 type in his table of amphorae discovered at the Castra Praetoria and, to a lesser extent, at Monte Testaccio, was used to transport olive oil from Hispania Baetica to Rome and the NW provinces of the empire. The artificial mound of Testaccio, just over 40 m high and covering an area of 2.2 ha, is a huge dump composed mainly of Dr. 20 amphorae, standing near the Emporium on the left bank of the Tiber. As has been acknowledged, its abandonment, a direct consequence of the construction of the Aurelian Walls from 271 onwards, did not signal the end of olive-oil imports from Baetica. In a similar way, the end of Dr. 20 production, in c.260-270, does not point to the end of oil-amphora production in that province and, more precisely, in the Guadalquivir basin where this form originates.

A traveler passing by ship in front of the peninsula during the 1st c. A.D. would have marveled at a continuous chain of private villas lining the coast (figs. 1-2). Although evidence of these villas survives to the present day, our knowledge is mostly fragmentary due to the fact that many are buried beneath modern estates or have been swallowed by the sea. Between the village of Aequa (near Vico Equense) and the far side of the Sorrentine peninsula with its adjoining islets a total of 24 ruins have been identified as structures related to villae maritimae, commonly dated on the basis of their building techniques to between the Late Republican period and the start of the 2nd c. A.D. Key architectural features of these villas include different porticoes, panoramic exedras, artificial and natural grottos, galleries, nymphaea and piscinae. What all these elements have in common is that they are situated at the very point of contact with the sea and use the bedrock as the ground for construction.

In 2009, a set of under-lifesized statues was discovered on top of the pavement of the main N–S colonnaded street of Sagalassos. Their particular find contexts suggest that they had been on display along the street on top of statue brackets in its final phase. These statuettes not only survived in the cityscape into the 7th c. A.D., they were part of a large-scale renovation of the lower town datable to the second quarter of the 6th c. This exceptionally late example of displayed pagan mythological statuary provides information on what pieces of statuary were still available and considered suitable for re-use in the Early Byzantine period. In addition, the collection's composition can inform us about the preferred appearance of a bustling urban thoroughfare and something of the values and beliefs of the population at that period, since “whereas the common folk […] did not read Homer and Pindar, everyone — the butcher, the candlemaker, and the lower-class saint — could and did look at these statues”.

The history of late-antique animal plagues requires a fresh start. Over the last 30 years, scholars have amassed copious quantities of written and material evidence for major shifts in the natural world experienced, or reported, as disasters in late antiquity. They have read textual passages more critically and interwoven written with physical data more meticulously than researchers before them. As a result, much more is known now about human plagues, climatic downturns and tectonic perturbations in the Late Roman period. Yet knowledge of late-antique livestock disease remains pretty much where animal health specialists left it in the 18th and 19th c. There are, to be sure, histories of late-antique animal plagues, but they are long out of date, unreliable and altogether of poor quality.