process in 1870 by breaching the Aurelian Walls, which had served as the principal fortification of Rome since the third century a.d. The task of reorganizing archaeology was daunting for the new national government. Unified state structures had to be created throughout the country: museums, universities, an administration for carrying out archaeology, legislation. The process happened rather slowly because there was so much to be done for this new state and because money was always short. But it was achieved, even if strong regional peculiarities developed along the way. This was hardly surprising because in the series of small states that existed before 1859, archaeology was developed to widely differing degrees (the Papal States and the Kingdom of Sardinia representing the two ends of the spectrum).

Foreign archaeologists flooded into the country after reunification. The deutsches archäologisches institut (German Archaeological Institute) was created out of the Istituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica in 1871, followed by the French School in 1873, the american academy in 1894, and the British School in 1899. The Italians particularly admired the German education system, and contacts were encouraged by political factors, for Italy entered an alliance with Germany (and austria) as the French attempted to intervene on behalf of the Papal States in the 1860s and 1870s. For archaeology the model was the new Altertumswissenschaft, or the science of antiquity, formed in the German and particularly the Prussian universities. “Science of antiquity” is perhaps a misleading translation, since in this system ancient texts had primacy, with great works of art next in line, and a strong streak of idealism ran through the research in which ideals and standards from antiquity were sought for application to modern times. But the scholarship was far more rigorous than the antiquarianism of the recent past, and the Italians struggled to emulate it; they had little to compare with the highly developed German system of gymnasium schools that produced hoards of students ready for university, already very well prepared in terms of the knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin. Important academic positions went to northerners: Julius Beloch held the chair of ancient history in Rome from 1879 to 1929, and the country’s most important chair of archaeology, in Rome, was awarded to Emanuel Löwy in preference to local candidates in 1889.

The textual/art-historical approach to archaeology was not all-consuming, however. One interesting exception was Giuseppe Fiorelli, made professor of archaeology in Naples in 1860. He was the first person at Pompeii to attempt controlled excavations, after the clearances conducted over the previous 100 years under the Bourbon kings of Naples. His field school (Scuola Archeologica di Pompei) was established in 1866 to train archaeologists in excavation methods, and Fiorelli was generally more interested in studying objects of all types in context rather than exploring the ideals encapsulated in works of high art. If Fiorelli’s excavations cannot be described as truly stratigraphic, they at least proceeded down from above, rather than tunneling into Pompeian houses from the side, as had been the normal practice. The first classical archaeologist to dig with a properly stratigraphical method was Giacomo Boni, director of the excavations in the Forum Romanum from 1898 forward. Boni was trained as an architect, and his excavation techniques were thoroughly professional and were thrown into greater relief by barely supervised excavations conducted on public land as the city of Rome was rapidly redeveloped (to say nothing of the clearances on private land, which were not supervised at all). Boni was a friend of the great Italian prehistorian Luigi Pigorini, who dominated the field for half a century until 1925 (and who often visited the Forum excavations), and his methods were doubtless influenced by contemporary paletnologia. Boni is most famous for the discovery of the prehistoric cemetery in the Forum Romanum and the Lapis Niger nearby. This latter monument was a pavement of black stone in the Comitium, mentioned in Latin sources, and it was associated with a stone marker bearing an inscription in very archaic Latin (ca. 560 b.c.) that alludes to early kings. Both finds shed important new light on the early history of Rome and partly confirmed some of the ancient Roman traditions.