Ostia Antica was Rome's ancient harbor. Its houses and apartments, taverns and baths, warehouses, shops and temples have long contributed to a picture of daily life in ancient Rome. Recent ...investigations have revealed, however, that life in Ostia did not end with a bang but with a whimper. Only on the cusp of the Middle Ages did the town's residents entrench themselves in a smaller settlement outside the walls. What can this new evidence tell us about life in the later Roman Empire, as society navigated an increasingly Christian world? Ostia in Late Antiquity, the first academic study on Ostia to appear in English in almost 20 years and the first to treat the Late Antique period, tackles the dynamics of this transformative time. Drawing on new archaeological research, including the author's own, and incorporating both material and textual sources, it presents a social history of the town from the third through the ninth century.
This book demonstrates how studies of the Roman city are shifting focus from static architecture to activities and motion within urban spaces. Detailed case studies from the three best-known cities ...of Roman Italy are provided, revealing how movement contributes to our understanding of the ways that different elements of society interacted in space, and how the movement of people and materials shaped urban development. The chapters examine the impressions left by the movement of people and vehicles as indentations in the archaeological and historical record, and as impressions upon the Roman urban consciousness. Through a wide range of historical issues, this book studies movement as it is found at the city gate, in public squares and on the street, and as it is represented in texts. Its broad objective is to make movement meaningful for understanding the economic, cultural, political, religious, and infrastructural behaviours that produced different types and rhythms of interaction in the Roman city.
An infection induces the migration of immune cells called hemocytes to the insect heart, where they aggregate around heart valves called ostia and phagocytose pathogens in areas of high hemolymph ...flow. Here, we investigated whether the cardiac extracellular matrix proteins, Pericardin (Prc) and Lonely heart (Loh), regulate the infection-induced aggregation of periostial hemocytes in the mosquito, An. gambiae. We discovered that RNAi-based post-transcriptional silencing of Prc or Loh did not affect the resident population of periostial hemocytes in uninfected mosquitoes, but that knocking down these genes decreases the infection-induced migration of hemocytes to the heart. Knocking down Prc or Loh did not affect the proportional distribution of periostial hemocytes along the periostial regions. Moreover, knocking down Prc or Loh did not affect the number of sessile hemocytes outside the periostial regions, suggesting that the role of these proteins is cardiac-specific. Finally, knocking down Prc or Loh did not affect the amount of melanin at the periostial regions, or the intensity of an infection at 24 h after challenge. Overall, we demonstrate that Prc and Loh are positive regulators of the infection-induced migration of hemocytes to the heart of mosquitoes.
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•Infection induces hemocytes to aggregate along the ostia of the heart in mosquitoes.•Pericardin and lonely heart are cardiac extracellular matrix proteins.•Pericardin and lonely heart regulate hemocyte aggregation on the heart.
We performed a combined geophysical and geoarchaeological survey of the harbour of ancient Ostia, Italy, to investigate the extent of the former harbour basin, the sedimentary infill and possible ...building remains around the harbour. Besides geoarchaeological results the paper highlights the advantage of combining vibracore drilling with different geophysical prospection methods, which are sensitive to different physical soil parameters. Geophysical methods applied were electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), ground penetrating radar (GPR) and seismics with shear and compressional waves. The extent and shape of the harbour basin were determined by ERT profiling. The ERT profiles were compiled into a 3D-model showing that the early lagoonal harbour basin was at least 100 m × 50 m wide. Its southern border was confirmed by GPR measurements clearly imaging the former land-water transition and the onset of ancient onshore building construction. At its eastern border a consolidated horizon could be mapped in 2–3 m depth by compressional wave tomography. This horizon most likely represents a cemented ramp, a small part of which had been excavated in a previous study. The sedimentary fill of the former harbour basin was investigated by a combination of vibracoring, ERT and seismics. The ERT profiles serve for inter- and extrapolating the vibracore stratigraphy from the coring locations over the whole harbour area. It turned out that one sedimentary unit, which is important for the harbour development, could not be resolved by ERT but clearly shows up in seismic velocity-depth profiles instead. It is a thin coarse-grained high-energy layer in 1–2 m depth, which was caused by a tsunami according to a previous study. This layer separates two harbour phases: an older lagoonal harbour phase underneath and a younger fluvial harbour phase above it. The high-energy layer represents a thin band of 100% increased shear wave velocity compared to the more fine-grained layers, in which it is embedded. This study is the first to show that tsunami-type sedimentary layers may be mapped by shear wave profiling.
Ostia dispersa Caldelli, Maria Letizia
Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Antiquité,
09/2019
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Per una serie di circostanze fortunate la maggior parte delle iscrizioni ostiensi si conserva ad Ostia, nei magazzini e sullo scavo. Non tutto però è rimasto nella colonia e parte del mio lavoro di ...questi anni si è rivolto alla ricerca di quella porzione non trascurabile di materiali che ha preso altre strade, ora legate al fenomeno dello spoglio e del reimpiego, ora legate alle vie del mercato antiquario, ora infine legate al commercio clandestino. Quelli che si presentano sono solo alcuni esempi di un lavoro teso a ricomporre una Ostia dispersa, almeno virtualmente.
The collection of samples and finds for archaeological surveys is traditionally based on the establishment of grids that allow the area under study to be discretized into generally square cells in ...order to allow a statistical assessment of the highest or lowest concentration of finds. Currently, such grids are implemented in a local coordinate system established by means of total stations or tape measures. We validated the capabilities of a low-cost GPS/GNSS Real Time Kinematic (RTK) receiver to build a grid during the intensive archaeological survey of the Piscina Torta site (Italy), in the framework of the Salt and Power project of the University of Groningen. We also tested not using a local grid but a cartographic grid (WGS84 UTM zone 33 N) and naming the single cells with the coordinates of one of its vertices. This approach is greatly facilitated by the recent availability of inexpensive RTK receivers with few centimetres accuracy, very small in size and weight and with hardware protected enough to be used in the field. This would facilitate the use and exchange of the data (e.g. about the materials collected in the cell) among the scientific community and can be thought of as a proposal for standardization.
Preprocedural computed tomography (CT) workup with assessment of virtual transcatheter heart valve-to-coronary ostia (VTC) distance and transcatheter heart valve-to-sinus (VTS) distances is ...recommended to assess the risk of coronary obstruction following valve-in-valve (ViV) transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR).
The authors sought to investigate the agreement of predicted VTC and VTS distances and observed post-TAVR anatomy on CT and their relationship with transcatheter heart valve (THV) expansion and deployment conditions.
Fifty-one patients who underwent a balloon-expandable ViV procedure were included in this study. The expansion of the THV stent frame was evaluated at 4 levels: THV inflow, surgical heart valve (SHV) sewing ring, SHV outflow, and THV outflow. Assessment of the VTC/VTS distances was performed on the pre-TAVR CT, and THV-to-coronary ostia and THV-to-sinus distances were assessed on the post-TAVR CT.
Following the ViV procedure, the THV stent frame flared toward the outflow but was generally underexpanded at all levels, particularly at the SHV sewing ring level. Postdilatation impacted the extent of THV expansion, resulting in greater expansion than nominal balloon filling at all 4 THV levels (P < 0.001). Observed THV-to-coronary ostia distances were systematically larger than predicted by the VTC distance (mean difference 1.25 ±1.28 mm) in patients with nominal balloon filling but systematically smaller in case of postdilatation (mean difference −0.45 ± 0.52 mm). A similar relationship was observed between VTS and THV-to-sinus distance measurements.
With nominal balloon filling, VTC and VTS distances underestimate postprocedural distances due to THV frame underexpansion. However, postdilatation may lead to distances smaller than predicted due to THV overexpansion at the outflow level.
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