Excavations undertaken as part of an engineered stabilization strategy to prevent further collapses are yielding a wealth of revelations about the daily lives of Pompeii’s inhabitants as the lens of social class analysis is increasingly applied to new discoveries, according to The Associated Press.
Led by a new director of the German-born archaeological park, innovative technologies are helping to restore some of Pompeii’s nearly destroyed glory and limit the effects of a new threat: climate change.
Archaeologist Gabriel Zuchtrigel, appointed CEO 10 months ago, compares the rapid deterioration of the situation in Pompeii, which began back in the 1970s, to “a plane that crashes to the ground and really risks crashing.”
The Great Pompeii project, which then received about 105 million euros of EU funds – provided that they were spent quickly and efficiently by 2016 – helped save the ruins from further degradation.
“Everything was spent, and well spent,” Zuchtrigel tells AP.
But with future conservation issues inevitable for ruins first excavated 250 years ago, new technologies are critical “in such a battle against time,” he told The Associated Press.
Extreme climatic events, including increasingly intense rainfall and scorching heatwaves, could threaten Pompeii.
It would be impossible to rely on the human eye to discern signs of climate-induced wear and tear on the mosaic floors and frescoed walls in the approximately 10,000 rooms of villas, workshops and modest houses excavated by archaeologists. So, artificial intelligence and drones will provide data and images in real time.
Experts will be warned to “take a closer look and eventually intervene before anything happens, before we get back to this situation of buildings collapsing,” Zuchtrigel said.
Since last year, artificial intelligence and robots have been taking on what would otherwise be an impossible task – assembling murals that have crumbled into tiny fragments.
The robots will also help repair damage to the frescoes at the Schola Armaturarum, the gladiators’ barracks. The weight of tons of unexcavated parts of the city pressed against the excavated ruins, combined with rainfall and poor drainage, caused the structure to collapse.
Seventeen of Pompeii’s 66 hectares remain unexcavated, buried deep under lava rock. A longstanding debate revolves around whether they should stay there.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the approach was: “let’s … excavate all of Pompeii,” says Zuchtrigel. But in the decades before the Great Pompeii project, “there was something like a moratorium – because we have so many problems that we will no longer excavate,” says Zuchtrigel. “And it was like psychological depression.”
His Italian predecessor, Massimo Osanna, took a different approach: targeted excavations during stabilization measures to prevent further collapses.
“But these were excavations of a different kind. It was part of a broader approach in which we combine protection, research and accessibility,” explains Zuchtrigel.
After the collapse of the gladiatorial hall, engineers and landscapers created gradual slopes out of the ground, out onto the excavated ruins, with a mesh to prevent collapse.
Toward the end of Via del Vesuvio, one of Pompeii’s stone-paved streets, work in 2018 unearthed an upscale domus, or house, with a bedroom wall decorated with a small, sensual fresco depicting the Roman god Jupiter disguised as a swan and impregnating Leda, the mythical Queen of Sparta and mother of Helen of Troy.
But as the Associated Press tells the Associated Press, if visitors stand on tiptoe to peer through the marvelous fresco on the house’s battlements, they’ll see utility rooms remain built under the newly “stabilized” unexcavated edge of Pompeii.
Nearby is the opening of the fortification project, the most pleasing to the public, a corner “thermopolium” with a tabletop similar to the familiar salad and soup bars of our time. This is a fast food place. Based on the organic remains found, the menu included mixtures of ingredients such as fish, snails and goat meat. Fast street food was probably the mainstay of the vast majority of Pompeii’s residents who weren’t wealthy enough to own their own cuisine.
Archaeologists are increasingly using social class and gender analysis to interpret the past.
When they explored an old villa on the outskirts of Pompeii, they found a room measuring 16 square meters. It was used as the pantry of the villa and the sleeping quarters for the family of slaves. There were three beds in the room, made of rope and wood. Judging by the dimensions, the shorter bed was for a child.
When the discovery was announced last year, Zuchtrigel described it as “a window into the unreliable reality of people who rarely appear in historical records” about Pompeii.