Michael Anderson
In AD 62 the city of Pompeii was devastated by so powerful an earthquake that both Tacitus (Ann. 15.22) and Seneca (Q Nat. 6.1, 1—3) made note of the destruction it had caused. Seventeen years later, when the city was struck by an even larger natural disaster in the form of the eruption of Vesuvius, many of Pompeii’s structures, both public and private, yet had signs of incomplete, uninitiated or even completely abandoned restoration efforts (Maiuri 1942; Adam 1986; Frohlich and Jacobelli 1995; Fulford and Wallace-Hadrill 1996, 107— 108). The years between these two events could therefore easily be seen as a period of urban decline and abandonment, hastened by continued seismic activity heralding the eruption itself (Marturano and Rinaldis 1995, 134; Allison 1995), of which those events mentioned by the ancient sources are simply the most dramatic moments. Indeed, while most scholars today would question Maiuri’s (1942) pessimistic view that after the earthquake the majority of the population had abandoned the city to squatters, freedmen, and slaves, the idea still persists that much of the information preserved in Pompeii cannot be used to examine ancient urban and domestic life in Italy during the first century AD (Descreudres 1993, 173; Lazer 1997, 104—105; Allison 2004, 179—198). Recent work in analyzing the precise provenance and distribution of artifacts within the city has demonstrated widespread evidence of interference with daily patterns: the presence of raw building materials in otherwise luxurious areas of the houses, abandoned or defaced Fourth Style decoration, and traces of reduced or transient living such as unusual cooking locations and only partially functioning or even entirely non-functioning kitchens (Berry 1997, 192; Allison 1994; 2004, 192-194; 2007, 388-389). It is clear that the damage caused by these seismic disturbances presented a major challenge to the city, but exactly how disruptive was this situation to the routines of daily life? This paper presents the results of work directed towards answering this question. Analysis of the precise spatial and visual contexts for artifacts of disturbance and rebuilding at Pompeii suggests that the earthquake(s) did not actually drive the majority of the population away from the city and reveals the priorities of the Pompeians themselves for the appearance of their houses during a time of upheaval and rebuilding. More than simply suggesting the presence or absence of disruption, artifacts of earthquake disturbance can reveal a diverse pattern of determined coexistence and considerable continuity during the site’s final years.
World History
