After defeating Hannibal and Carthage in the Second Punic War (218–201 B.C.), Rome found itself the dominant power in the western Mediterranean. While it may seem obvious that Rome’s prospects would rise, having vanquished its chief military, economic, and political rival, a new study led by Katrin Westner of Goethe University suggests that it was the massive influx of Iberian-mined silver into the Roman economy that fueled its unprecedented expansion. Researchers analyzed the elemental composition and lead isotope signature of 70 Roman coins issued between 310 and 101 B.C. in order to determine the source of the silver ore. The results show that in the decades before the Second Punic War, Roman silver originated mostly from Aegean sources and Greek colonies in Magna Graecia. However, coins issued after the war had a different isotope signature, one that closely matched known metal sources from the Iberian Peninsula.

The silver mines of southern Spain were an enormous economic resource once exclusively controlled by Carthage, but which Rome appropriated following its victory. This newly acquired reserve, combined with Carthaginian silver acquired as war booty and indemnities paid by Carthage, brought an extraordinary amount of capital into Rome’s coffers.

Vividly colored red and blue fragments of wool discovered at a copper mining site in southern Israel’s Timna Valley are offering new insights into the social standing of metalworkers who lived in the remote area. The fragments, which have been radiocarbon dated to 3,000 years ago, are the earliest known examples of textiles treated with plant-based dyes in the Levant. But the plants used to make the dyes—the madder plant for red and most likely the woad plant for blue—could not have been grown in the arid Timna Valley. Nor was there enough water available locally to raise the livestock necessary to provide wool or to dye the fabric. The textiles must, therefore, have been produced elsewhere. According to Naama Sukinek of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the discovery suggests that at least some of the metalworkers at Timna had the resources to purchase this imported cloth. Says Sukinek, “Our finding indicates that the society in Timna included an upper class that had access to expensive and prestigious textiles.”

In northern Italy 2,500 years ago, Etruscans developed a unique system of beekeeping to manufacture honey, beeswax, and other products. Archaeologists working at the site of Forcello recently gained rare insight into ancient beekeeping when they uncovered the charred and melted remains of honey, honeycombs, and honeybees in a workshop that had burned down between 510 and 495 B.C. Researchers conducted chemical and palynological (pollen) analyses of the material to determine not only the composition of Etruscan honey, but also what types of plants bees were collecting pollen from two and half millennia ago. While bees in northern Italy today feed abundantly on nonnative plants that have been introduced to the region, during the Etruscan period, bees were foraging from aquatic sources such as water lilies and the flowers of wild grapevines found along shorelines. This produced a kind of grapevine honey that is completely unknown today. Since these plants were not particularly abundant around Forcello, experts believe that Etruscan beekeepers maintained beehives on boats that moved along river courses and took the harvested honeycombs back to their workshops to extract the honey. “We have tried to study the finds and their context from all possible angles and, surprisingly, we ended up having very strong indications of a nomadic form of beekeeping,” says New York University researcher Lorenzo Castellano. In fact, a passage from the first-century A.D. writer Pliny the Elder’s Natural History mentions a town only about 12 miles from Forcello, and the historian discusses the movements of the beehives by boats. Says Castellano, “Our finds, which are more than five centuries older, appear to confirm Pliny’s narrative.”