The ancient synagogue in Rome’s port city of Ostia was uncovered by accident in the early 1960s during the construction of a highway between Rome and the newly built international airport in Fiumicino. The discovery of a Roman-era synagogue was big news, and the excavation and restoration of the building was carried out between 1961 and 1963. Several popular publications about the building appeared over the next few years, but no proper excavation report was ever produced, and very few of the artifacts discovered at the synagogue were ever published.

Beginning in 2001, a project based at the University of Texas at Austin began re-examining the 1960s work and conducting new archival investigations and archaeological excavations at the site. One aspect of the project has been an attempt to coordinate the artifacts excavated in the 1960s with the more recent stratigraphic excavation undertaken by the Texas team. The results of this work are sometimes pretty amazing, and they are starting to be published.

Some of the artifacts excavated from the synagogue in the 1960s were briefly discussed in the early publications and so have been in some sense “known about” for a long time, even if they were wrongly dated. For example, a few of the 1960s articles about the synagogue showed a series of terracotta lamps decorated with menorahs and torah shrines.

These have now been systematically studied and published by Letizia Ceccarelli (see her chapter here).

Other material found at the site of the synagogue has been almost entirely unknown to the wider public, and some of it is incredibly interesting. Among the objects excavated from one of the earliest phases of the building are two of terracotta figurines. One depicts a lar (a Roman household god) and the other is the Roman goddess Venus:

They are preserved in relatively good shape, and excavation records indicate that they were discovered in the same spot. They seem to have been deposited together in antiquity. What were these Roman gods doing in a Jewish synagogue? Mary Jane Cuyler has published the figurines and her chapter is available open access.

Other finds from the 1960s excavation of synagogue include a coin hoard found under a mosaic that was published by Daniela Williams in 2014 (see the open access article here). More material from the Ostia synagogue should be published in the near future.