Introduction

Eric Poehler, Miko Flohr and Kevin Cole

Pompeii is the great laboratory of the Roman archaeologist. The breadth and the detail of the evidence that the city preserves has made it, along with Rome and a handful of companion sites, an essential archetype for Roman archaeology writ large. It is therefore of great importance that we continually reconsider how we investigate, analyze and interpret this vast resource. Wallace-Hadrill (1994, 64) famously remarked twenty years ago that Pompeii “is at once the most studied and the least understood of sites. Universally familiar, its excavation and scholarship prove a nightmare of omissions and disasters. Each generation discovers with horror the extent to which information has been ignored, neglected, destroyed and left unreported and unpublished.” The present academic generation is the first to have been trained with this quotation as its reality and is the first to understand its pessimism as a call to action. In fact, although a discrepancy still exists between the vast amount of data available for study and the limited body of evidence upon which our common scholarly perception of the site are largely based, the balance is shifting. Scholars have become increasingly aware of the need for an approach to Pompeii informed by an increasing number of perspectives and constrained by an evergrowing dataset (Trigger 1998, 23). As a response, there are now several trends and developments that point to an optimistic future for the study of this ancient city.

The last three decades have seen a rise in systematic and detailed investigation and subsequent publication of complete houses, insulae and other urban areas, often as part of large, long-running fieldwork projects, such as the German Hauser in Pompeji series (e. g., Strocka 1984; 1991; Ehrhardt 1988; 1998; Seiler 1992) and the British project in the insula of the Menander (Ling 1997; Allison

2006) . The volumes of the Pompei: Pitture e Mosaici series (PPM) have given scholars convenient access to pictures, plans and drawings of almost every excavated building on the site. The 1990s saw a virtual reawakening of scholarship on Pompeii, including the work of Paul Zanker (1988; 1995; 1998), Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (1994), Ray Laurence (1994; 2007), John Dobbins (1994;

2007) , Jens-Arne Dickmann (1999), and Penelope Allison (1994; 1995; 2001; 2004; 2006) who have critically evaluated traditional methods and approaches and have provided new and credible models for the interpretation of material remains. Over the past two decades, the number and scale of Italian and foreign research projects at Pompeii have increased almost annually. The establishment of the Rivista di Studi Pompeiani and the series of volumes edited by the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei has created a forum that allows researchers to publish detailed studies and specialist datasets and make them widely available. A continuous series of conferences, workshops, panels and sessions attest to the persistent and increasing scholarly interest in Pompeii. Simultaneously, the digital revolution has, perforce, created the tools for rapid information exchange, remote interaction within any ever-growing scholarly community, and the ability to store immense amounts of data. The sum of material directly accessible on the internet keeps expanding at an exponential rate, including hard-to-find nineteenth century guides and excavation reports. Online journals such as FOLD&R (Http://www. fastionline. org/folder. php) provide a platform for scholars to publish fieldwork reports quickly and allow rapid worldwide dissemination of information. These developments and others are radically transforming Pompeian scholarship. At the same time, there is an increasing awareness of methodological and theoretical problems related to Pompeian studies and these problems are being more explicitly and elaborately addressed at conferences and in print. Our ideas about many aspects of the city and its history have already profoundly changed, and current developments suggest that considerably more changes are to follow. We are now sitting at a unique and exciting cross-road in the academic history of Pompeii.

The present volume reflects these developments and is written by a generation of scholars that is among the first to profit from the number of publications and amount of discussion that has been produced over the last decades. It was born at the 108 th annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Diego, early in 2007, but it is not a conference proceedings. Rather, the genesis of the volume came from the sudden awareness by the contributors that there was more than similarity amongst the papers, that there was an undercurrent in the dialog that resonated throughout the presentations on Pompeian topics that year. Such commonality was not only between the papers in the Pompeii session, but also from other talks in disparate sessions. These papers incorporated many of the ideas and methodologies pioneered in the 1990s, but pushed them further by combining them or by applying them to new data. In the long and fruitful discussions that followed the sessions we came to understand that within our new, individual ideas we shared a common outlook about how the archaeological record of the Vesuvian area should be approached in the early twenty-first century. For this reason, in editing the volume, we have encouraged the authors to make use of each others insights and to relate their own observations with those of the other contributors.

Thus, although each of the ten chapters focuses on its own specific evidence and raises its own specific research questions, there is considerable overlap in critical notions acknowledged and methodological approaches employed. As far as the topics discussed in this volume are concerned, three main themes emerged. The first four chapters may be categorized under the heading ‘art’. While these chapters deal with a familiar theme that has long been central to the field of Pompeian studies, they approach it with a renewed energy and make clear that there is still considerable room for innovative work within the area of domestic art and architecture. This is particularly true for the methods of study and interpretation. The three subsequent chapters deal with the more down-to-earth sides of urban life related to work, industry, and the economy. More importantly, these papers approach categories of material and sets of questions that have been severely neglected over the last two and half centuries and make clear that aspects of everyday life have much to add to our understanding of Pompeii in the last years of its existence. The final three chapters move away from private concerns and discuss aspects of the archaeological record related to the public infrastructure of Pompeii, which is an area of research that, until fairly recently, was also often overlooked by Pompeianists. New methods and more thorough analyses of the material evidence have made it possible to develop unique insights into the realm of infrastructure and planning.

Yet, while we decided to assign each contribution to one of these three categories, the reader will notice that many contributions overlap the boundaries of the other categories. Indeed, several could easily have found a place in one of the other sections, thus emphasizing the degree to which the contributions are interrelated. Moreover, because of the scholarly basis shared by most authors, there are some themes and problems that recur throughout the book. The most important of these is conception of the situation in Pompeii in the decades preceding the 79 AD eruption. There is, of course, an old, but still unsettled debate about seismic activity in the Bay of Naples area in the 60s and 70s of the first century AD. At the core of this debate were literary references to two major earthquakes in the early 60s AD in the works of Seneca, Tacitus and Suetonius (Sen. Q Nat. 6.1; 6.26—27; Tac. Ann. 15.22; 15.33—34; Suet. Ner. 20.2), later supplemented with epigraphic evidence for post-earthquake reconstruction works discovered in both Pompeii and Herculaneum (CIL X, 846; 1406). It is thought that one large earthquake struck Pompeii and its surroundings in 62 or 63 AD and that another one hit the city of Naples a year or so later, and that there is an uncertain amount of smaller and larger seismic events that did not make it to the literary record (Frohlich and Jacobelli 1995; Allison 2004, 182—196). While this debate continues (cf. Wallace-Hadrill 2003), the more relevant question for the present volume is the impact of these earthquakes on the archaeological record of Pompeii and on the social life in the Vesuvian area in the third quarter of the first century AD. During this period, seismic activity was a factor to be reckoned with and smaller and larger earthquakes were, as suggested by Pliny in his letter to Tacitus, a more or less normal fact of life in the Bay of Naples (Plin. Ep. 6.16). Most authors in the present volume are unimpeded by the lack of consensus on this issue, focusing instead on the changed circumstances of life in the aftermath of the seismic activity, whatever its chronology. Indeed, Maiuri’s old idea of post-earthquake Pompeii as a city in steady decline awaiting its doom (Maiuri 1942) finds little support. Instead, the contributors to this volume identify and explore a wider array of responses to both the physical damage to the city and the social disturbance within its populace caused by such upheavals. They further acknowledge that these are relevant issues to be accounted for when understanding the Pompeian archaeological record itself: the very fact that the city suffered severe and repeated earthquake damage in its last years of existence makes it possible to raise questions about Pompeii that cannot easily be discussed elsewhere. Yet, as most of the subsequent chapters reveal, the seismic background of the Pompeian evidence functions as an extra methodological layer or a perspective from which to approach urban life rather than as a goal in itself.