 Spring/Summer 01 | |
|
|
 |
Considering Pompeian House Contents An excerpt from the introduction to a book /CD-ROM volume, Pompeian Households: An Analysis of the Material Culture, to be published in 2003. Artifacts from Casa del Menandro>> |
The excavations of the southern Italian town of Pompeii are some of the oldest and most renowned archaeological explorations in the world. For over two centuries, they have been visited by thousands of tourists each year, in the desire to witness an ancient Roman town “frozen in time.” For over two centuries this site has also been continuously reinvestigated by classicists, ancient historians, art historians, and archaeologists. It may, therefore, come as a surprise to some that no comprehensive study of Pompeian house contents, and particularly of the materials removed during those excavations, has been carried out. This study undertakes—for the first time since in 1873 Giuseppi Fiorelli organized lists of artifacts from his excavations in Pompeian houses according to function—a systematic collation of household assemblages to produce baseline data for analyzing the spatial distribution of domestic activities in these dwellings. These data also provide a useful body of evidence for a detailed investigation of the state of the town during the period leading up to and including the final abandonment. One of the main issues facing such a study, however, is the need to reinterpret the excavations carried out during the last 250 years. Questions are now being asked which were not considered relevant at the time of excavation and which, therefore, were not taken into account in the excavation procedures and recording strategies.
Throughout much of Pompeii’s excavation history predominant emphases have been on unearthing building structures to illustrate textual references to Roman architecture; retrieving works of art for display in museum collections; and ensuring that the Pompeian excavations remain an economically viable resource for cultural tourism. Less artistically interesting artifacts have been removed to storerooms for typological studies and still less intrinsically valuable finds have been left in situ for public display. Broken and fragmentary material of no perceived value has been discarded. Before we can hope to use Pompeian evidence to write a substantive history of domestic behavior in Roman houses, we must first develop a holistic approach to the Pompeian remains that includes investigation of the distribution of house contents. To assume that the Pompeian architectural and decorative evidence combined with the academic treatises of the Roman literary élite will provide us with a picture of domestic behavior which is representative of the Roman world, over the whole Roman period, simplifies reality and conflates and juxtaposes often unrelated data.
This study used a sample of thirty Pompeian atrium houses. The contents of these houses were collated into a database and the resulting assemblages were studied room by room and then house by house. The first procedure used the predominant patterns of assemblages in each room type to systematically test the appropriateness of current allocation of room function to each type based on textual nomenclature and modern analogy. The second tested each house for the accepted model of a single phase of occupation from ad 62 to ad 79. The results did not always correspond to the traditional concepts of room use in Pompeian houses, nor did they correspond with the ideal model of a single phase of occupation from the earthquake of ad 62 to the final eruption of ad 79. Rather, they showed that a single house floor assemblage, reputedly dating to ad 79, could in fact include layers of deposition indicating various and changing activity within the preceding period. Penelope M. Allison is currently an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow at the Australian National University. |
Garden of Casa degli Amorini Dorati, from the west.
Garden of Casa degli Amorini Dorati, from the east.   
|