Infrastructure

Infrastructures, rather than being the parts of practical systems, are the functioning, interconnected, and interdependent systems themselves. An order of magnitude larger than their components, understanding these systems requires the consideration of both their complete physical architectures and the administrative structures that permitted their operation. The investigation of infrastructures must not only bring all these components together, but also give attention to the specific functioning of those systems, including the directionality of their operation. For example, because water systems only flow in one direction, what happens upstream impacts the reality downstream. The study of parts alone creates an imaginary equality across the system that bars us from a more realistic and more interesting image of the ancient city. By this definition, the study of infrastructures is a methodological departure for Pompeianists, even if the study of their parts has long been of interest. The most prominent of these parts are, of course, the water supply system and the network of urban streets, which also serves as drainage for the city (Map 3).

The water supply system of Pompeii is, as a whole, far less well understood than one might expect (Jansen 2001, 27). In part, this is because modern scholarship has largely tended to compartmentalize the subject by focusing separately on the sources of water, the architecture of distribution and consumption, and the means of discharge, categories that themselves are further subdivided. Thus, water sources have been studied under the rubric of wells (Maiuri 1931), the collection of rainwater, and the aqueduct (Ohlig 2001; De Feo and Napoli 2007), while individual works concerning distribution are found on the castellum divisorum (Hodge 1996; Ohlig 1996; Adam and Varene 2008), water towers (Larsen 1982; Heres 1992; Wiggers 1996; Dessales

2006) , piping (Nappo 1996; Jansen 2001; Dessales

2007) , and fountains (Nishida 1991). Public baths (Eschebach 1979; 1982; Koloski-Ostrow 1990; Manderscheid 1993; De Haan and Wallat 2008), private baths (De Haan 1996; 2001; 2009) and the hygienic effects of water, including toilets (Koloski-Ostrow 1996; Jansen 1997; Hobson 2009) are considered on their own and with little connection to the necessary systems to carry the waste water. Furthermore, drainage is itself often treated in a piecemeal fashion, discussing surface drainage (Koga 1992; Jansen 2000) or sewerage (NSc 1900, 587—599; Eschebach 1987) without clearly articulating how these systems worked together (or did not). Without an understanding of these systems holistically, we cannot begin to ask more nuanced questions about life in the ancient city. Were there qualitative differences in piped water at different parts of the system? Did the differing levels of waste water flowing in streets affect the social texture of neighborhoods? The publications ofWiggers (1996) and Jansen (2000, 2002) are bright spots in the study of water systems, showing a shift in analysis towards an infrastructure of water.

The same kinds of questions need to be asked about the streets of Pompeii, especially as they are inextricably linked in their role as conduits for runoff. Since they first were revealed, the streets of Pompeii have been a subject of fascination (e. g., Twain 1869, 328). Beyond fascination, however, the study of streets largely has been limited to their description or their piecemeal use as a proxy for the discussion of other topics. Thus, Gesemann (1996) gives careful consideration to the shape and structure of the streets, detailing the individual components of the road. These parts themselves — the curbstones, paving stones, and other street features — have been explored more closely to help determine property boundaries (Saliou 1999) and the social identity property owners wanted to express (Hartnett 2008). When larger units of analysis are examined, such as an individual street or those of an entire region, the position of the street operates as a chronological marker for the development of surrounding properties (Jones and Schoonhoven 2003) or the layout of sections of the city plan (Pesando and Coarelli 2004; 2006; Befani 2008; Sorriento 2008).

The works of Wallace-Hadrill (1995) and Ray Laurence (1994; 1995; 2007) use streets as a metric to establish the social geography of Pompeii and stand out as the most useful of these proxy analyses. It has been the research on the traffic within the streets, however, a topic that requires consideration of the serial nature of using the streets, which has begun to treat streets as infrastructure rather than objects. Sumiyo Tsujimura’s (1991) seminal publication on the ruts in Pompeii was the first to look at the possibility of a systematic organization of traffic. Although her evidence could not conclusively describe the system of traffic, her analysis was dependant on connecting the interpretation of directions at one intersection to the next intersection along each path. Recently, Tsujimura’s efforts have been expanded upon by Poehler (2006, 2009), whose research has traced the specific directional movements of ancient traffic and confirmed the reality of an organized system of traffic.

The contributions in this volume tackle issues related to water and streets, but do so in a more holistic manner, dealing with systems rather than parts and considering their inherent interconnections and/or the directionalities of their operation. Alan Kaiser’s paper challenges the reader directly in the title to consider “what was a via”? Kaiser first mines the rich vocabulary for urban streets in the literary sources to discover what a Roman might have meant when using these different words for streets. His conclusions in this section become his hypothesis as he then tests them against the physical fabric of the streets of Pompeii. Employing Space Syntax analysis (Anderson, this volume), specifically the concept of depth, Kaiser demonstrates how the interrelationships among streets at equivalent ‘depths’ can serve to create areas that are more isolated or more integrated with the rest of the city. His analysis then goes further to map the varying functional uses of space along onto these streets in order to evaluate his literary conclusions. In this approach, Kaiser has turned the usual manner of using Pompeian streets on its head, interrogating the use of frontages so that the character of the street can be understood more precisely within the constellation of meanings for the Roman street.

The cutting edge research of Keenan-Jones, Hellstrom and Drysdale has, somewhat paradoxically, revived for re-examination the old question about whether piped water systems put Romans at risk for lead poisoning. Consensus has held that the accretion of mineral deposits inside pipes would protect the water from absorbing lead. In his isotopic analysis of the sinter deposits on elements of the architecture of the water supply system — from inside the aqueduct, to the outside of water towers, and over the walls of reservoirs — Keenan-Jones found that levels of lead in the water fluctuated even as the sinter deposits grew thicker. In order to interpret these apparently counterintuitive results, Keenan-Jones could no longer conceive of the water system as a monolithic entity and search for a singular cause for their results. Instead he sought to explain the divergent results of the tests within the context of a dynamic and interdependent infrastructure, in which effects in one area can cascade down the system, having greater or lesser impact over distance. Despite the preliminary nature of his results, Keenan-Jones’ findings suggests that still finer details of the experience of life in ancient Pompeii are yet to be discovered through the study of infrastructural systems.

The final paper by Poehler brings the discussion of water and streets together to examine the infrastructure of drainage around the forum at Pompeii. His discussion begins with a tour of the forum’s entrances, where the intersection of the monumental design of the forum and the practical elements that support it are most evident. Rather than placing the utilitarian in a secondary or subservient role to the monumental, Poehler describes complete systems of water supply connected to drainage schemes that were clearly planned together with ornamental design of the forum. It is the use and reuse of the streets surrounding the forum, however, especially those that have lost most or all of their connection to the rest of the urban network, which reveals the consistency of the Pompeian city planners’ practical responses. Poehler’s work not only demonstrates the interlocking relationships in the infrastructures of traffic access and drainage, bonded together in the physical form of the streets, but also directly connects these practical design elements to those repeated architectural concepts used to regularize and monumentalize the forum of ancient Pompeii.