Pompeii: 101 Featuring Dr. Jess Venner

You probably know two things about Pompeii. One, that it was Roman, and two, that it was destroyed by a volcano. Both are true, but they explain surprisingly little about one of the world's most important archaeological sites. What exactly was Pompeii? Who lived there? What happened during the eruption? And why, after nearly 300 years of excavations, are archaeologists still making new discoveries? I'm Dr Jess Venner. An ancient historian and archaeologist at the University of Oxford specialising in Pompeii. I'm also the author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii. This is Pompeii 101 for Ancient Rome Live, in collaboration with Life in the Past Lane. This is the start of the Pompeii series where I'm going to take you through all of the essential things that you need to know about Pompeii and all of the juicy things that you might have missed. Make sure you subscribe to Ancient Rome Live and Life in the Past Lane to keep up with the series. Shall we get started? Before we get to the volcano, we need to understand what Pompeii actually was. Pompeii was a medium-sized ancient city in Campania, in southern Italy. It lies around 23 km southeast of Naples and 9 km from Mount Vesuvius. It's also positioned on the River Sarno. Today it's inland, but in antiquity the coastline was much closer, connecting Pompeii with the Bay of Naples and Mediterranean trade. The city covered approximately 66 hectares, which is roughly 90 football pitches, and it was surrounded by more than three kilometers of defensive walls. Its population number is debated, but somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 is about right. Behind those walls were houses and shops, workshops, bars and bakeries, temples, baths, theatres, and a big old amphitheatre. And Pompeii was home to landowners and politicians, but it was also home to merchants and craftspeople, agricultural workers, migrants, freed people, and thousands of enslaved men, women, and And children. Although we call Pompeii a Roman city, it wasn't actually founded by the Romans. Its early development was during the 7th and 6th centuries BC, and it was actually shaped by Oscan, Greek, Etruscan, and Samnite cultures, so it's quite a melting pot. Pompeii became a Roman colony only in 80 BC, so by the time Vesuvius erupted almost 160 A few years later, it was already an ancient, densely occupied, What happened to Pompeii in AD 79? One quiet afternoon in AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted. Its last major eruption had taken place during the Bronze Age, so no one had any idea what was going to happen. No one even knew it was a volcano. A vast column of ash, gas, and pumice rose approximately 33 kilometers above the volcano. Pumice then began falling across Pompeii and the surrounding cities, gradually filling their streets. Now, at first, people could still move through the city, and thousands did escape. But the eruption continued for approximately 18 hours across two days. The pumice became several meters deep. And it blocked doorways and caused roofs to collapse. We also had seismic activity going on, as well as huge rocks falling from the sky in incredible heat. Some inhabitants sheltered inside, waiting for relatives or guarding their property. Many believed the danger would pass. And during a lull on the second day, in the morning, many actually returned to Pompeii to retrieve their possessions and find loved ones. And this is when the worst thing happened. At around 6.30 a.m. on the second day, fast-moving currents of hot ash, gas, and pumice began flowing down the volcano. These are called pyroclastic flows, and they are incredibly hot and incredibly fast. And anyone facing one of these would die instantly. This is exactly what happened to everybody left. in Pompeii. The pyroclastic flow swept through the streets of Pompeii, destroying its streets and buildings, and it was buried under six meters of volcanic material. A number of flows followed, but anyone that had been still inside the city So far, about 1,600 to 1,700 victims of the eruption have been found in Pompeii, and this gives us a mortality rate of between 8 and 11% for a population of about 20,000 people. It could have been far worse, we don't actually know how many people are still outside of the city or in the third that's left to be excavated. This is quite remarkable for a disaster of this size, but what's important to remember is the survivors were displaced. They became refugees in their own country. They no longer had a city to go to. They'd lost family and friends. And they'd lost their homes and possessions. It was a human tragedy of a scale rarely seen in history. When was Pompeii discovered? Pompeii wasn't rediscovered in one dramatic moment. It actually happened over quite a long period of time. In the years after the eruption, survivors and looters actually returned to Pompeii to recover possessions as well as marble from buildings and building material. And they were able to do this because of upper parts of buildings were actually remaining visible above the volcanic debris. Some people were even settling among the ruins temporarily. And by the Middle Ages, the area was known as La Civita, the city, and its ancient identity had been completely lost. Between 1594 and 1600, workmen supervised by Domenico Fontana drove a channel beneath the hill to carry water from the River Sarno to mills at Torre Annunziata. As they dug, they actually found frescoes, but Fontana covered them back up. Nobody knew it was Pompeii. Systematic excavations began in 1748 under Charles of Bourbon, which was 10 years after the work started at Herculaneum. This actually came first. And even then, excavators didn't know what settlement they had found. This wasn't securely identified until 1763, when they found an inscription confirming the identity of the city as Pompeii. Now, early excavators were mainly searching for sculptures, mosaics, wall paintings, treasures. Basically, for the Bourbon Royal Collection, and they were destroying valuable archaeological evidence in the process. During the 19th century, Giuseppe Fiorelli introduced a more systematic approach. He divided Pompeii into the regions, blocks, and numbered properties we still use today. And in 1863, he also began pouring plaster of Paris into cavities, left by decomposed bodies. And this created Pompeii's famous... plaster casts, of which we have just over 100. Why is Pompeii so important? Pompeii was a fairly ordinary Roman city, but what makes it exceptional is its survival and its preservation as a result of the conditions of the eruption. Elsewhere, we might find an isolated temple or a villa or an inscription, but in Pompeii, we can examine the relationships between an entire city's houses, businesses, streets, Religious buildings and and public spaces. A single street can reveal how carts moved, where people collected water, which buildings contained shops, and which potential candidates were even being supported by local inhabitants. Cooking vessels, animal bones, and carbonized food reveal what people were eating. And phylai, or wine containers, can trace commercial connections, while tools and workshops provide evidence for work. Even root cavities are allowing us to reconstruct gardens, orchards, and vineyards. We have around 10,000 pieces of graffiti throughout Pompeii, and these include electoral notices, which record political campaigns, but also graffiti with jokes, arguments, advertisements, relationships, and even the names of people that are entirely absent from Roman literature. Human remains are now being studied using DNA, isotope analysis, and medical imaging. And this is revealing information about health and diet as well as biological relationships and mobility. Pompeii wasn't frozen during an ordinary day. It actually endured a major earthquake in AD 62 and lots of seismic activity before and after this date, so its inhabitants in AD 79 were still rebuilding and adapting their city. So we're not only seeing Roman urban continuity and how it's functioning, but also a city in a state of prolonged disturbance. What is happening at Pompeii today? Around two-thirds of Pompeii has been excavated and approximately 22 hectares remain buried. Archaeologists aren't racing to uncover all of it though. We want to leave archaeological remains underground because this is often the best way to protect them. Once exposed, walls, floors and paintings can become vulnerable to weather, vegetation, pollution and of course the millions of visitors coming through the site every year. Since 2012, the Great Pompeii Project has focused on stabilising buildings and excavation fronts, improving drainage, conserving decorated surfaces, and also reopening unsafe areas. Targeted excavation is continuing where it helps us to protect the boundary between the exposed and the buried city. So, recent work in Region 9 has uncovered houses, as well as a bakery, a building site, and spectacular new paintings and you can actually go and visit this and look down on the excavations from above. Many more discoveries are still being made in Pompeii, in laboratories but also in archives and at desks. We've got DNA analysis, we've got archaeobotanical work, medical imaging, digital mapping, 3D scanning, all of this is producing new information from both recent and older finds. The list is endless of the possibilities and we are still finding so much about Pompeii. and Roman society more generally. But as I said, the priority today is not to uncover the remaining city as quickly as possible, but to protect and understand what has already been exposed. And that is your Pompeii 101. Have you visited Pompeii? What surprised you most about the city? Let us know in the comments and subscribe to Ancient Rome Live and Life in the Past Lane for more in this series. Thank you for watching.