Excavations and awards: two different ways to tell today's archaeology
A boundary stone and an altar unearthed at Aquinum, in Lazio, and five discoveries shortlisted for an international award at Paestum show two complementary ways of giving value to findings: patient excavation and public recognition.
In Lazio, the eighteenth excavation campaign carried out by the University of Salento at Aquinum has yielded two artifacts, presented on October 3 during the Weekend dell’Archeologia. Among them is a votive altar in marble, whose new fragment has made it possible to reconstruct an inscription that was previously incomplete, now making legible the deities to whom the altar was dedicated: the Genius of Augustus, the Lares of Augustus and the Genius of the Colony, according to SiViaggia (source).
It is an example of how archaeological work often proceeds by accumulation: a missing fragment, found decades or centuries after the rest of the artifact, can change the reading of an entire cultic context. In the case of Aquinum, the combination of imperial cult and civic cult — Augustus paired with the Genius of the Colony — offers additional evidence of how peripheral Roman communities built their religious identity around the figure of the princeps.
On a different level is the International Archaeological Discovery Award Palmyra, which will be presented on October 30 at Paestum during the Borsa Mediterranea del Turismo Archeologico. The award does not produce excavations, but selects them and puts them in competition: among the five discoveries shortlisted for the 2025 edition are a Roman hypogeum-mausoleum found in Albania, in the Bulqize Valley, and the sunken port of Taposiris Magna, in Egypt, according to Artribune (source).
The two episodes are not connected to each other, but together they capture the dual nature of contemporary archaeological work: on one hand, fieldwork, slow and cumulative, which at Aquinum required eighteen campaigns to arrive at a legible inscription; on the other, the public visibility that an international award can give to discoveries thousands of kilometers apart — from the Balkans to North Africa — bringing them onto the same stage at Paestum.
The verdict on the five finalists of the Palmyra award is expected on October 30.
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