In 1964, Frank Brown, then Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the American Academy in Rome, began excavations in the Roman Forum, at a site thought to represent the home of Numa—the late eighth century BC successor to Romulus as king of Rome. Known as the Regia, the building was also said to be a temple and thus marked the origins of a mixture of political power with religious practice that was the hallmark of Romans’ particular socio-religious practice. The Regia, then, like the hut of Romulus or the temple on the Capitoline hill, is where Rome might be said to have begun. Due to ill health, Brown was never able to publish his two-year excavation in the Regia, but he left an extraordinary archive of his work—complete with diaries, photos, drawings, and detailed descriptions of findings.
The Roman Regia Revisited project, a collaboration between the American Academy in Rome, the University of Michigan, and the Università della Calabria aims to undertake the first real evaluation of Brown’s evidence as a whole, while at the same time presenting his amazing dataset to make it more accessible to future archaeologists interested in this famous structure in the middle of the Roman forum.
