Pompeii

Pompeii is the closest thing archaeology has to a time machine. On the morning of 24 August 79 CE, the city was a functioning Roman town of between 11,000 and 20,000 inhabitants going about their daily lives, buying bread from bakeries whose loaves have been found in the ovens, applying graffiti to walls whose inscriptions include election endorsements, insults, lovers' declarations, and gladiatorial results, walking streets whose stone paving still bears the ruts of wagon wheels. By the evening, the entire city was buried under four to six metres of volcanic material. Everything that was in use that morning — the food on the tables, the paintings on the walls, the tools in the workshops, the signage above the shops — was sealed beneath the volcanic deposits and preserved in a condition that no deliberate conservation programme could have achieved.

What emerged when excavation began in the eighteenth century is not just an archaeological site but a snapshot, unmediated by the selective survival that characterises almost all other ancient evidence, of Roman urban life at a specific moment. Walking Pompeii is not like visiting a ruin. It is like visiting a city whose inhabitants stepped out for a moment and have not yet come back.

The site covers approximately 66 hectares within its Roman walls, of which about 44 hectares have been excavated. The remaining 22 hectares are unexcavated and constitute an archaeological archive of extraordinary significance, preserved underground in a condition that above-ground excavated areas can only aspire to. The excavated areas contain the remains of temples, basilicas, baths, theatres, an amphitheatre, houses ranging from modest single-room dwellings to elaborate courtyard villas, taverns, workshops, bakeries, brothels, and the full complement of a functioning Roman city.

The frescoes of Pompeii are among the most significant survivals of ancient painting anywhere in the world. At Pompeii, entire rooms with their painted programmes intact have been recovered, and the range of subject matter — mythological scenes, still life, landscape, erotic imagery, theatrical masks, and architectural fantasy — gives an unparalleled picture of the visual culture of a provincial Roman city of the first century CE.

Pompeii's significance operates at multiple levels. As a document of Roman urban life it is without parallel, providing evidence for social history, economic history, domestic life, religious practice, public culture, and material culture that no literary source and no other site can match. The evidence it provides for aspects of Roman life that written sources either ignore or sanitise — the organization of commercial sex work, the diet of ordinary people, the physical experience of urban streets, the decoration of modest homes as well as grand ones — has transformed Roman social history as a discipline and continues to generate new research as analytical techniques improve.

The site is also significant for the history of archaeology itself. Pompeii has been excavated continuously since 1748, and the history of that excavation — from the treasure-hunting extraction of the Bourbon court to the scientific stratigraphic approaches of the late twentieth century — is in many ways the history of archaeology as a discipline.

The volcanic disaster that preserved Pompeii also provided the plaster cast technique, developed by Giuseppe Fiorelli in the 1860s, that allows the voids left by decomposed human and animal bodies in the volcanic deposits to be filled with plaster to produce casts that preserve the postures and expressions of people at the moment of their deaths. The casts are among the most viscerally affecting objects in any archaeological site.

Structural Deterioration and Collapse

The most acute and immediate threat to Pompeii is the structural vulnerability of its exposed built fabric. Two thousand years of preservation underground, followed by two and a half centuries of exposure since excavation, has left much of the site's masonry in a condition where collapses are not exceptional events but regular occurrences. Walls weakened by moisture infiltration, root growth, and the cumulative effects of thermal cycling and biological attack lose material regularly. The conservation resources available, even after the Grande Progetto investment, are not sufficient to address the backlog of structural need across the entire excavated area simultaneously.

Water and Drainage

Water is the most persistent enemy of Pompeii's structures. Rainwater that penetrates walls and floors carries salts that crystallise on and within masonry surfaces as the water evaporates, exerting pressure that loosens plaster and stone. The drainage of the site — both surface and subsurface — has never been comprehensively resolved and remains one of the most important and most difficult conservation engineering challenges the site faces.

Seismic Risk and Volcanic Proximity

Pompeii sits in one of the most seismically active areas of Europe, in the shadow of the volcano that preserved it. Vesuvius last erupted in 1944 and remains an active volcano whose potential for future eruption is continuously monitored. The accumulated structural weakness of Pompeii's exposed masonry means that the damage from significant seismic events could be severe.

Mass Tourism

Pompeii receives approximately 3.5 million visitors annually, concentrated across a site where the fragile surfaces of frescoes, mosaic floors, and plaster walls are directly accessible. Visitor management has improved considerably in recent years, with timed entry systems and route management helping to distribute the flow, but the fundamental tension between the scale of visitor interest and the site's physical fragility remains.

Climate Change

Rising temperatures, more intense rainfall events, and changing patterns of humidity are all affecting the biological and chemical processes that act on Pompeii's exposed structures. The salt crystallisation processes responsible for much of the surface damage to plaster and fresco are sensitive to humidity cycles in ways that will be altered by changing climate conditions.

Pompeii has been the subject of continuous scholarly investigation for nearly three centuries, and the research it has generated spans Roman history, classical archaeology, art history, social history, volcanology, conservation science, and public heritage management.

The recent new excavations in Regio V have been conducted to the highest contemporary standards of documentation and analysis, and the speed with which findings have been published and communicated to a broad public represents a model of research transparency that has attracted considerable positive attention. The use of multi-isotope analysis of human remains to reconstruct the biographies of individuals found in the site — determining where they grew up, what they ate, and aspects of their social status — has produced findings that bring the human reality of the site's population into clearer focus than any previous analysis.

Research into the eruption sequence of 79 CE continues to refine understanding of the chronology and character of the disaster, with recent work suggesting that the traditional date of August may be incorrect and that the eruption may have occurred in October, based on evidence including the presence of autumn fruits in the deposits and the clothing of some victims.

Pompeii's conservation crisis is structural and cumulative, and it is not resolved by the Grande Progetto investment, welcome and significant as that was. The excavated area is too large, the backlog of conservation need is too extensive, and the funding available for ongoing maintenance is too limited for the current situation to be sustainable over the long term without continuing high-level political commitment and international support.

The collapses that attracted international attention in 2010 and subsequent years were not anomalies. They were symptomatic of a condition that affects the entire excavated area to varying degrees, and without sustained investment at a level that keeps pace with deterioration, more collapses will follow. Each collapse is irreversible.

Pompeii is the most vivid document of everyday ancient life that exists anywhere on earth, and the people frozen in its volcanic deposits are as real, as individual, and as present as any human beings who ever lived. Protecting what remains of their city is not an academic exercise. It is an obligation to them and to every generation that comes after us who deserves to encounter what they left behind.