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Hi everybody, from Wanderate, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

It's great to have you all here and thanks for joining me.

Rome is an iconic city and it's been an iconic city for more than 2,000 years.

Whether we're talking about St. Peter's Basilica, the Castell Santangelo, my personal favorite

landmark, or the Colosseum or the Pantheon, different ages have contributed strikingly different

things to the city's landscape.

Nor is the focus on Rome somehow misplaced.

It's been at the heart of an empire spanning three continents, the heart of a religious

tradition, impacting billions of people, and the heart of a modern nation state involved

into the largest conflicts in human history.

But what was Rome like before all that?

How did it come into being?

How did its early residents change it to make it a suitable place for them to live?

Answering those questions might seem impossible since the answers are buried under millennia

of occupation, but today's guest is better equipped to answer them than almost anybody

in the world.

Dr. Andrea Brock is an expert on the archaeology of Archaic Rome and particularly on its ancient

environment.

She's a lecturer in classics at the University of St. Andrews, the director of the Center

for Ancient Environmental Studies and has excavated extensively in Rome itself, publishing

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