The largest dig in a lifetime is under way in Pompeii

Economist

19 hours ago

Culture | Roman, not ruins
What lies beneath the pumice in the ancient city is magnificent
Was he her lover? The two skeletons, male and female, were clearly physically close when they died: she on a bed, he on the floor. Archaeology offers other hints. She seems to have been richer (or at least was carrying gold); they spent their last hours together (debris trapped them in the room); those hours were terrible (he, his injuries show, died first). Archaeology offers one final clue: their ages. She was in her 30s or 40s; he in his teens or early 20s. Perhaps they were lovers, or mother and child, or total strangers. Even at the distance of 2,000 years you find yourself hoping she did not watch her own son die.
Welcome to Pompeii. This is the ancient city both as you have seen it before—graffiti, frescoes, tiles, toilets and some highly enviable terrazzo—and as you have never seen it before. The largest dig in 70 years is under way: 3,200 square metres have been uncovered and innumerable tonnes of soil, rubble and pumice have been moved. In them are, so far, three houses, a bathhouse, a fresco that looks so like a pizza that archaeologists call it the 'not-pizza' fresco, five human skeletons and, this being Pompeii, lots of phalluses.
The dig feels faintly surprising, less for what is being found (little has been able to surprise archaeologists since Pompeii's infamous god-having-sex-with-a-goat statue was unearthed in 1752) than that there is anything left to be found at all. Pompeii feels so familiar: it has appeared in films ('POMPEII' in 2014) and fiction (Robert Harris's 'POMPEII') and non-fiction (Mary Beard's —guess what—'POMPEII').
In the three-odd centuries since excavations began, it has been used—and, critics say, abused—by almost every generation. It has been used as a stone quarry (nice stones) and a classical one (nice statues). It has been held up as a parable of sexual liberty (its frescoes); sexual immorality (that goat) and debauchery (ditto). It has been seen as a paradigm of civilisation (its plumbing) and barbarism (its slavery).
Every generation has offered a reaction: Christians tutted at it; Mussolini had dinner in it; Professor Beard metaphorically winked at it. It is often called a 'lost city' but few cities have had such exposure per square metre. Its art is found on fridge magnets and its mosaics made into doormats. The city has been recast as a souvenir. So much of Pompeii is known that it is easy to forget how much is not known: one-third of Pompeii is still unexcavated.
That is obvious once you look closely. Walk through the popular bits of Pompeii—past the theatre, amphitheatre and brothel—and keep going and you will find yourself in quieter streets with fewer people and more pigeons. There are shopfronts here too, but their windows open onto a wall of earth: nothing seems to be behind them. These are the undug streets.
But, after an injection of EU cash, archaeologists started digging in 2023. The dig is 'complicated', says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the site and author of 'The Buried City', a recent book. If you were to add an archaeologist to your novel, you would add Dr Zuchtriegel: German, handsome, he is fluent in three languages and mildly forbidding in all of them. (To cheer himself up, he reads the New Testament in ancient Greek.) Ask him his feelings on uncovering this stuff and he says 'nothing': you are just 'so concentrated'. The epigraph of his book comes from Herman Melville's diary: 'Pompeii like any other town. Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive.'
To call this a 'dig' is to underplay the speed of it. Pompeii offers some of the finest archaeology in the world; it also offers some of the fastest. When Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, sending a cloud of ash 32km into the sky and surprising the locals—who not only did not know that Vesuvius was a volcano, but had no word for 'volcano'—what fell on Pompeii was not lava but pumice stones, so light that locals, as Pliny the Younger, a Roman writer watching from a nearby villa noted, 'tied pillows over their heads…for protection'.
The stones kept falling at a rate of 15cm an hour. In three hours, they reached people's knees; in six, the height of a toddler. Most people fled—perhaps 90% escaped. Those who sheltered and stayed became, like the skeletons in the house, trapped. Their room, says Sophie Hay, an archaeologist, 'became their tomb'. Walls started to collapse under the weight (one killed the young man). Then the volcanic cloud collapsed and a wave of superheated pumice, gas and ash raced, at speeds of 100kph and temperatures of over 200°C, down the slope. In Pompeii, people suffocated. In Herculaneum, people's brains boiled.
It is hard to imagine a more appalling end—or, for archaeologists, a better one. The grains of pumice beneath were so light and dry that they protected all they fell on; so easy to remove that archaeologists, says Dr Hay, call it 'Amazon packaging material'. You less excavate Pompeii than unbox it, brushing grey, frozen-foam crumbs of pumice from a fresco here and shovelling it out of a swimming pool there. In days columns start to emerge, inverse Excaliburs, from a slowly sinking lake of grey.
The problem with Pompeii is not getting stuff out: it is keeping it upright once you have. The same pumice-pyroclastic one-two that caught bodies as if in freeze-frame—this one clawing at a throat, or that little boy writhing—caught buildings in the same way. A shattered column or wall mid-fall can be wholly held up by pumice. Take it away and, like a game of giant Jenga, the whole thing might fall. A cat's cradle of scaffolding winds its way around the walls (see picture on previous page). Dr Zuchtriegel likens digging to performing 'a complicated operation'.
It has been worth it, as what has been found is breathtaking. That is partly because, like so much else in Pompeii, it is untouched by time and partly because, like very little else in Pompeii, it is untouched by archaeologists. Pompeii's relics have suffered as much from enthusiasts as eruptions. The Bourbons plundered Pompeii (you can still see the holes, cut as if by giant mice, in the walls). Napoleon's sister, Caroline, planned, with Napoleonic efficiency, to uncover it all in three years. Everyone has stolen from it.
The new excavations, by contrast, are pristine. A bathhouse has such perfect curved steps on its plunge pool you could imagine slipping into it today. A nearby wall is painted with such rich pigment you might find it on a Farrow & Ball colour chart ('Cataclysmic Ochre'). Many of the houses are mid-refurbishment. In one, roof tiles sit stacked, ready, on the floor; a builder's plaster-splashed bucket waits by a wall. Archaeologists play a game—a Roman Rightmove—of which house is nicest: the not-pizza-fresco one? The baths one?
It is a bit of fun. But there is a ghoulish guiltiness to ogling Pompeii. Posterity accuses the Bourbons of 'collector syndrome'—the urge to acquire antiquity. But, Dr Zuchtriegel suggests, tourists are guilty of it too, acquiring experiences as greedily as Bourbons snatched artefacts. Millions visit each year, sweating across its forum, smirking in the brothel where the audio guide tells you about 'la vie sexuelle de Pompéi' in nine languages. Dr Zuchtriegel has limited the daily number of visits to 20,000, down from 36,000.
He would prefer people not to tick off lists but to look at one thing, carefully. Which thing? He shows a favourite: in a small house there are little charcoal drawings of some gladiators. When they first uncovered this last year, they thought it might have been a stylised adult's drawing. Then they dug further and found that the artist had, in their way, autographed it, drawing round their own hand in charcoal. To judge from the size of the hand, the artist must have been six or seven. When they see it, everyone does the same thing, Dr Zuchtriegel says: they stretch out their own hand to hold it over where the Pompeiian child put theirs. Same old humanity, whether one be dead or alive.
Photographs: Danilo Scarpati