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The History Channel original podcast.
Hello History This Week listeners and hello in the studio with me today, Alana Casanova -Burgis.
Hi, Sally. So good to be here.
Alana, welcome. We are so, so delighted to have you here.
And just to explain, you are here because you are going to be hosting today's episode of History This Week and some others coming up this season.
We are thrilled. Oh my gosh.
I am so thrilled to be on this team.
I really love the show.
I love history. I'm so happy to be a nerd with you all.
Oh my gosh. Well, we're so excited to have you on board.
What are we going to hear today?
What's today's story?
Well, I don't want to give too much away, but if you like archaeological tours, if you like ancient Rome, yes.
if you maybe don't like but are intrigued by exploding volcanoes.
Intrigued. Definitely.
Then this episode is for you.
All right, Alana, take it away.
History This Week, October 24th, the year 79.
I'm Alana Casanova -Burgis.
Earthquakes are a normal thing in Pompeii.
They happen pretty often.
Even without modern science, the ancient Romans knew that living in the shadow of an active volcano, in this case, Mount Vesuvius, meant that now and then they would experience a terremotus, an earthquake.
So the tremors this morning are nothing out of the ordinary.
By all accounts, life went on as usual.
Pompeii is a city in the Roman Empire.
Around 15 ,000 people live here.
It's a major trading port near the coast with thriving marketplaces selling goods from around the world.
Pompeii is also a hub for handcrafted items.
Pottery, jewelry, textiles, all manufactured and sold within the city's dense urban sprawl.
Being near Mount Vesuvius also has its perks.
The volcanic soil is rich with nutrients, and the city is surrounded by vineyards and orchards and wheat fields.
This allows Pompeii to have a vibrant culinary scene.
There is no shortage of what are basically fast food joints.
Counter service places where you can grab a fish stew with a spiced wine.
There are also what we'd call sit -down restaurants, not too different from ones you'd walk into today.
But they're not quite as clean, because animals roam freely throughout the city, indoors and out.
These kinds of details about the lives of average people in Pompeii, they're only coming to light recently.
Because historically, scholars have focused on the lives of Pompeii's rich and famous.
In the past, there was a real focus in Pompeii and studies on the big elite mansions.
But in the past couple of decades, there's been more and more work done that's interested in other types of buildings.
Alison Emerson is a scholar actively leading an archaeological excavation of one of the sites where lower and middle -class Pompeians spent their time.
She wants to uncover a more nuanced version of ancient Rome, not the typical stories of emperors and gladiators.
To do this, her team is focused on just one small block, tucked away in a corner of Pompeii, where regular people lived and worked.
It's giving us a whole new understanding of what life was like 2000 years ago.
This part of the city where I'm working, it was definitely overlooked, say, 10 years ago.
But these are the people that I'm trying to understand.
There are several businesses in this site Emerson is studying, including a restaurant.
On October 24th, there's likely a group of Pompeians just sitting down for a meal when the sky goes dark.
Today, Pompeii, the ancient Roman city known for meeting its violent end, preserved in ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
It's a story that's been told countless times in books and movies, but we're learning more about Pompeii every day, literally layer by layer.
So what's revealed by this one city block?
And how was life in Pompeii 2000 years ago not so different from today?
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Alison Emerson is a professor of Roman archaeology at Tulane University.
Her fascination with Pompeii began before she can remember.
I think it was so far back that I'm not even sure.
I'm volcanoes in history.
And the first time I went to Pompeii was when I was in college and I saw archaeologists working there and I just remember thinking, wow, how do I get that job?
That is a dream job.
And somehow it actually happened.
Emerson has been working at Pompeii for the last 16 years.
She's currently overseeing the Pompeii 114 project.
That's 1 .14. Region 1, block 14.
It's on the edge of the city, far from the more popular sites tourists tend to visit.
Like the city's forum or its theaters.
Unlike those places, it's an area where Roman elites likely wouldn't have stepped foot.
And to Emerson, that's an opportunity.
Because not only are these kinds of sites less well studied, but the written sources from Pompeii's heyday aren't told from the average citizen's point of view.
For the most part, the texts that we have are texts that were written by elite men and especially writing from the perspective of Rome itself.
So archaeology is the best way to get at the other groups, in my opinion.
That's the best way to see the rest of the Roman world.
First, it's important to understand Pompeii's placement within the ancient world.
Pompeii is located on the Bay of Naples, that's southern Italy.
So it's south of Rome, but within a couple of days journey from Rome.
But despite being relatively close to Rome geographically, Pompeii hadn't been a Roman city for that long.
Around 200 years before the eruption, Pompeii is its own city -state.
It's in the political orbit of the Samnites, a culture from the hills of central Italy and has a distinct language and religion from the Romans to the north.
The Romans and the Pompeians are just allies.
Until they aren't. Eventually, that system breaks down in what we call the social war when the Roman allies come together, set up a confederation of their own, and attempt to free themselves of Rome's influence.
The social war does not go well for Pompeii.
In 89 BCE, the Roman general Sulla lays siege to the city.
He blockades the walls, tries to starve them out.
Then he bombards Pompeii with artillery.
Sulla is using the ballista, sort of an ancient catapult crossbow hybrid, which Allison Emerson says we can still see evidence of today.
It seems that Sulla, his troops, seem to have besieged the city from the north, and there are still marks of ballista in the walls, so you can see the circular marks that could really only be left by ballista.
In order to organize the Pompeian citizens who are defending the city, leaders paint messages on walls to direct them where to go.
These messages are also still visible.
There are some painted notices on some of the walls of the city that survive that ask residents of the city from different neighborhoods to gather in certain places, and those are believed to be part of the defense of the city.
But Pompeii falls. Rome wins the social war.
Afterwards, everybody in Italy becomes a Roman citizen, including in Pompeii, and Pompeii becomes a Roman city.
It's a tricky thing because when you're doing archaeology, sometimes the questions that you most want to have answered, like how did your life change, person living in Pompeii, when the Romans came in?
The archaeology is not always great in giving us those types of answers.
But what we know for sure is that a lot of wealthy people move in, so considered an excellent place to go to build a summer home for the Romans, so a lot of Roman elites are spending time there.
That means that there's money coming into Pompeii.
That means that there's power coming into Pompeii.
Pompeii becomes the Hamptons to Rome's New York City, but all of that power and money, it's not exactly being shared equally.
The people who were already rich before the conquest, they benefit the most.
It's their homes getting upgraded into mansions, not the lower and middle classes.
The local elite is getting wealthier and wealthier and moving into more and more powerful circles, and others are becoming poorer and poorer, and others are losing more and more power.
Ancient Rome has extreme inequality.
It's important to remember that this is a society built on slavery.
So whenever we talk about the Romans and what the Roman elites are doing, anything that the Roman elites are doing, any power that they have is entirely resting on the Baxman enslaved people.
A lot of enslaved people, in fact.
It's difficult to speak in precise numbers, but maybe as many as 30 to 40 percent of the population would have been enslaved by the first century CE.
That's on par with the percentage of enslaved people living in the American South in the lead -up to the Civil War.
In Pompeii, slavery is just as much a part of the social fabric as it was in the US.
Enslaved people make up a large portion of this dense, vibrant urban landscape.
And in one corner of that landscape, near the city wall in the southeast, is Emerson's archaeological site, 114.
Let's say we're back in Pompeii and want to find this site.
There aren't really maps or street addresses.
Emerson says you'd start with the fountains.
There are more than 50 public fountains in Pompeii, and each one is decorated with a different symbol.
So you might say, oh, stop at the fountain that has mercury on it and ask the guy at the shop there where my shop is, and he'll direct you to where I am.
But if you can't go the fountain route, word of mouth should work just fine.
It seems more likely that they would do something like say, oh, well, you'll find me at the shop that is across the street from this guy's shop.
And you should ask at the forum stop into this shop.
And the guy there will tell you where to find me, that sort of thing.
Eventually, you find your way to what we'd now call 114.
It's one large building subdivided into many businesses and it is bustling.
The first thing that you would see are shops.
These shops face out onto the street selling all kinds of stuff.
There's one of those fast food stands selling ceramic bowls of stew.
There's another part of the building where baskets and reed mats are being woven.
And through Emerson's archaeological work, we know the name of the woman, likely doing that weaving.
It's extremely rare to learn the name of a working class person in ancient Rome.
And strangely enough, that detail comes from politics.
There are election posters painted on the outside walls of the building at 114.
These are what we call programmata, which are election endorsements.
So instead of putting your election sign in your yard, instead of sticking your sign up to let people know who you support, you have signs painted on the building.
These signs don't just have the name of the candidate running for office.
They also have the name of the person endorsing them.
One of the endorsers is named Tegeticula.
So Tegeticula asks us on one of these election notices to vote for Rufus in an upcoming election.
We don't know who that Rufus is.
That's a common enough name for the Romans.
But her name is very distinctive.
Tegeticula translates to little reed mat.
Of course, it suggests that she's associated with this reedworking workshop.
So if you find a reedworking workshop and somebody on the facade of the workshop has a name that means reed mat, you're probably safe to say there's a connection here.
She lives here. She works here.
Emerson says that because her name is so closely associated with her occupation, it's possible that Tegeticula either is or was enslaved.
Which means she wouldn't have been able to vote in the election in which she's endorsing a candidate.
But she was also a woman.
Which means in ancient Rome, she wouldn't have been able to vote anyway.
But she's still participating.
She's still participating in the political process.
And looking at the size, the scale of the workshop that she was a part of, it's easy to imagine that this wasn't in vain.
That she absolutely might have been a woman who her neighbors would have taken interest in who she was endorsing.
But this endorsement could be something valuable for the person running for office.
Just from a name on a wall, we can gain insight into the life of a person who lived 2 ,000 years ago.
It's the magic of archaeology.
While Tegeticula's workshop takes up part of the building, the majority is dedicated to a restaurant.
And this restaurant also gives us major insights into everyday Pompeian life.
It might seem counterintuitive now, but the wealthy people in Pompeii, you would rarely catch them eating at one of these places, regardless of how nice a restaurant it might be.
If you could afford it, you entertain at home because you have a house that's big enough to have guests, to have a dedicated dining room, and of course to have enslaved people to do the cooking and the serving.
This phenomenon is proven by the space itself, with evidence visible even 2 ,000 years later.
This place is trying to look like a fancy Roman home, but if you look closely, there's something a little off.
For one thing, Roman elites usually have the faces of their family members painted on the walls of their dining rooms.
The restaurant has portraits that kind of look like these types of portraits, but not quite.
They're generic portraits of followers of Bacchus, the god of wine.
Silenus, this kind of old man, mythological figure.
Two of them are main ads, the female followers of Bacchus.
So they're sort of discount versions of what you'd find in a wealthy person's home.
But if you're in Pompeii's lower or middle class, this is a great place to treat yourself to a nice meal.
As is typical in Roman dining, they don't have tables and chairs.
You would recline on couches.
The couches are typically arranged in a pie shape.
That's the number pie, not the food pie.
So kind of a U shape.
And you would recline on your left elbow.
Food would be placed on shared dishes in the center.
It's a sort of reclined, relaxed communal dining.
There are spoons for serving into individual bowls, which most people ate out of with their hands, like many cultures today.
Back in the kitchen, you'd find a lot of similarities to a modern restaurant.
There are stoves, which for the Romans are a kind of counter with a space for fire underneath.
So you stoke the fire underneath and then you can pull out the coals and put them up on top.
And then you cook on tripods, on metal tripods above that.
A bit like a grill, like a charcoal grill.
There's even a dishwashing station, a big sort of sloping concrete pad that then slopes into a drain.
The Pompeians store food, like wine and olive oil, in these large ceramic containers called amphorae.
And there's damage on that concrete pad that is perfectly in line with if you kind of repeatedly set down the end of a big heavy amphorae and then tipped it into that drain.
It's exactly at the place where you would imagine it being used that way.
Another feature in the kitchen, something you would not find today, hopefully, are latrines.
They didn't have germ theory.
They didn't really think through, understand this is a really bad idea.
The latrines are used both for human waste and kitchen scraps, and that's great for archaeologists like Emerson, who can now look at those holes in the ground scientifically.
We've excavated a lot of latrines, which people often immediately say, ugh, but after 2 ,000 years, there's nothing gross in there.
And even after all this time, you can still find food particles at the bottom of these latrines, and they tell us exactly what Pompeians ate at this restaurant.
We see a lot of fish.
We see a lot of meat, lots of fruit and a huge variety of fruit.
Just this past summer, Emerson's team made a huge discovery.
Well, it's technically very tiny, a peppercorn.
And this, okay, a peppercorn, what?
This is actually really exciting archaeologically because pepper does not grow in Italy.
This peppercorn came from the western coast of India, from really, truly across the world.
A single peppercorn says a lot about life in Pompeii.
It gets back to that earlier idea that after joining the Roman Empire, the city is plugged into an international trading network.
We often think of Roman history as European history, and I am always very fast to say that is not the case.
Roman history is Europe, it is Africa, it is Asia, it is the linking together of so many different people in different cultures that Roman power in all of its horror, which it certainly brought, is also tying people together in a way that hadn't happened before in the ancient Mediterranean.
A peppercorn is also kind of a luxury item.
Of course, this is not for nutrition.
This is something that is being used only for flavoring.
So this immediately gives us an idea about the types of meals that could be eaten here, that it might be something pretty elevated.
And this is far from the idea of elite Romans, you know, eating peacocks, and the people on the street corner, the common Romans, eating gruel.
This tells us that lower and middle class Romans have access to flavoring that elevates their dining experience, something that would normally be reserved for the elites.
The peppercorn suggests that this restaurant is truly trying to offer the regular Pompeians their taste of the good life.
If you look at the walls of the building at 114, they're not perfectly uniform.
There are visible repairs, concrete filling in cracks.
Like we heard in the opening, earthquakes happen pretty often in Pompeii, and these repairs are made after earthquakes hit the city.
There's a major one that hits in the year 62 or 63.
A major earthquake that comes before the eruption of Vesuvius, about 17 years before the eruption of Vesuvius, and that, I believe we're seeing, but it's tough to say again because there's probably other earthquakes too.
Pompeians are used to earthquakes, which is why on the morning before Vesuvius erupts, no one really panics.
But before we get to the eruption itself, it's important to talk about the date, which might have been October 24th.
There's an active debate about that in the academic community.
I will say this date is highly disputed.
So, we have a literary date, which is pretty clear.
The literary date is August 24th, which was recorded in the only source from the time about the eruption, written by the politician Pliny the Younger.
But there are many things found in the ruins of Pompeii that suggest this didn't happen in August.
This brings us to the archaeological date.
Heaters are found inside rooms.
People are wearing heavy clothes.
We have things like pomegranates, which come of age and they ripen and are ready for harvest in the Bay of Naples in October, not prior to October.
In 2021, scientists find a message written on a wall in the city.
It's a charcoal scrawl of a date, which couldn't have been made long before the disaster.
It says October 17th, which is obviously later than August.
Generally, the archaeology points to a fall date and the literature points to a summer date.
And I think where you fall between those dates is it often depends on whether you're someone who is more inclined to put your trust in literature or more inclined to put your trust in material.
To me, that's what's exciting.
I like it when we can't necessarily perfectly answer a question.
It's possible that October 24th really was October 24th when Pliny wrote it down.
It might be explained by how the Roman calendar is interpreted today.
But whether it's in early afternoon in August or in October, in the year 79, Vesuvius erupts.
The built -up pressure from gases and magma sends a column of fire and smoke shooting into the air.
The magnitude of the eruption is on the same scale as Mount St.
Helens in 1980. The magma has been ejected out of Vesuvius with so much force that it's going all the way up into the stratosphere.
It's immediately cooling into pumice stones and those along with ash are spreading into this huge mushroom cloud.
Pliny the Younger writes that the smoke emerging from the mountain looks like an Italian pine tree, which does look like a mushroom cloud.
And unfortunately for Pompeii, the way the wind was blowing on this day took that cloud directly over the top of Pompeii.
This cloud of pumice stones starts to rain down on the city along with larger rocks that have broken off from the inside of the volcano.
There's also earthquakes, there's walls falling down, there's fires.
This is in Pompeii that it must have been just utter chaos.
At our 114 site, we can only speculate what Pompeians were doing during the eruption.
Maybe people eating or working in the restaurant flee once this pumice starts raining down.
Contrary to popular belief, many people in Pompeii were able to escape.
If you left on the first day you're more likely to survive.
And probably a lot of people did.
If you got out on the day of the eruption, you had a solid shot at escape.
But Vesuvius is only getting started.
The next day is far more deadly and will destroy the city of Pompeii for good.
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On the first day of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, all of the heat is moving up into the sky, propelled by the force of the eruption.
But once that force dies down, the heat begins to move not upwards, but outwards.
Right towards Pompeii.
You begin to get what we call pyroclastic flow.
This is a super -heated blast of air and fine ash that's really like a bomb exploding from the volcano.
And it is not possible to survive a pyroclastic flow.
On the second day, Pompeii is engulfed in this super -heated dense black cloud of ash.
Anyone still in the city is killed almost instantly.
This ash falls so quickly and so violently that people and animals are trapped inside, suspended in animation.
That's what makes this eruption unique.
The speed at which this pyroclastic flow descends upon the city.
That's why so much is preserved.
It formed such a tight mold around that as the organic material rots away, it leaves a void in the ash and the shape of whatever was there.
Archaeologists later fill these voids with plaster and then you can excavate the ash out around it and you're left with this cast from the ash that represents what was once there, the human body that was once there.
Today, those plaster casts are visible throughout the ruins of Pompeii, over a hundred of them.
But there are over 1 ,100 victims at Pompeii that haven't been cast.
They were found as skeletons in the debris and two of them were found at 114, a man and a woman.
We don't know anything about them.
We can say what they were carrying, the woman was wearing some earrings, they had a few coins.
Alison Emerson says it would obviously be amazing to know more about these people, but given the nature of archaeology, we have more questions than answers about their lives.
Were they people who worked there?
Were they people who were fleeing, who took refuge here?
We just can't know.
Were they people who knew each other?
We often like to create stories about these casts based on what people are carrying, where they are, who they're with.
But the reality is, this is a city in a state of utter chaos and devastation.
It's really hard for us to sort those things out based on the evidence that we have.
By the third day, Pompeii is basically destroyed, buried under layers of pumice and ash.
Many do escape successfully.
In fact, it's possible that the majority of Pompeii's citizens make it out in time.
But because Rome doesn't maintain centralized records of its citizens, there's really no way to know specific numbers.
This is the nature of history in archaeology.
Sometimes inferences are made based on the best evidence available, but historians develop innovative ways to get around these limitations.
Archaeologists and historians have traced names that are represented in Pompeii before the eruption and not in other places, and then are represented in other places after the eruption.
Basically, a name that's unique to Pompeii before the eruption might pop up in, say, Naples a few years later.
Archaeologists have also examined the land immediately surrounding Pompeii for evidence of escape.
Unfortunately, those excavations prove that many people couldn't get out in time.
People are fleeing into the countryside, into the suburbs of Pompeii, down to the port.
These are places that are largely unexplored, but when they have been explored, especially areas along the coast, often bodies have been found often in pretty large numbers.
Fairly soon after the eruption, Rome's emperor, Titus, starts a relief initiative.
There was an imperial effort to resettle people, to redistribute wealth from families that had been wiped out, and to draw wealth out of Pompeii.
To take any resources from Pompeii couldn't be reused elsewhere.
This starts a centuries -long tradition, digging into Pompeii and pulling out anything valuable.
Pompeii was never a lost city.
People who lived in the area have always been using this site as a quarry for their own building.
They realize that it's much easier, like, look, there's all this stone under us, we can just dig down, and we can pull these stones out, and we don't have to go quarry them and carry them from someplace else, we can use them to build our own stuff that we need.
Seventeen hundred years later, locals still know Pompeii is there, buried underneath.
There's a little hill there that the locals call Cevita, which means the city.
So they know there's a city there.
Pompeii is rediscovered in 1763 under Charles III of House Bourbon, the Spanish monarch who controls the region at the time.
It's a revelation to them, but not to those who live nearby.
His engineers rediscover this and he thinks this is great because it's a great way to decorate his palaces.
You've got a backyard full of statues and marbles and gold and things like that, it really works out well for him.
Charles has his men pilfer the site.
It begins as a looting project, it is a project to pull ancient sculpture and other sorts of things that can be used by the King out, and it was treated as his private playground.
When Napoleon takes over the Kingdom of Naples in 1806, his younger sister Caroline becomes personally invested in making the ruins a more scientific venture.
But the start of Pompeii as a serious archaeological site doesn't come until 1860, when Giuseppe Fiorelli, an Italian archaeologist, takes charge.
Fiorelli introduces several really important changes, things that had been experimented with but that he really makes standard.
The first and the most important is top -down excavation rather than tunneling.
In years past, excavators would dig into Pompeii through the side, often destroying many ruins along the way.
By digging from the top down, they can approach the site more methodically, brushing away the ash and pumice layer by layer, cataloging everything they find as they go.
Fiorelli also comes up with the numbering system that Pompeii still uses today.
That's how the 114 site gets its name.
But maybe his most conspicuous contribution is those plaster casts, the impressions of bodies that are still the most striking images from Pompeii today.
These individuals are in kind of curled up poses, which is due to heat causing muscle contraction.
But it looks a lot like someone responding to or being knocked over by this ash cloud or someone hiding their face, and that's really, it lets us feel the tragedy, which is real.
That's a real feeling.
Pompeii is now one of the most popular ancient sites in the world.
Nearly 4 million people visited in 2023.
It's both a tourist destination and an archaeological site.
Allison Emerson and the Pompeii 114 project are very much actively excavating their area.
She says, if you're in Pompeii, stop by.
We're really happy to talk with people who are coming by who have questions about what we're doing or to show people things that we're finding.
So we're researching, but we recognize that where we work is really interesting.
People want to know about what we're doing.
Looking ahead, she hopes that the discoveries made at 114 can expand her mission.
And think of this restaurant slash basket weaving factory slash fast food joint in the context of the area around it.
This is not an isolated building.
This building is embedded within a neighborhood from which we really can't separate it.
And in order to understand it, we need to understand that neighborhood.
So we would like to expand the excavations.
We're hoping to keep digging outside the building we're in now and to start moving into neighboring buildings so that we can start piecing together how this part of the city worked as a neighborhood, as an organism, and not just as individual, separate little pieces.
But even with just the work she and her team have done so far, Emerson is still blown away by what they've been able to learn about every day Pompeians, living and working and eating in this one block, completely unaware of the tragedy that would come to define their city.
We've been able to achieve even beyond what I expected coming into this project.
Whenever we're looking into the past, we're automatically looking through a very narrow window because we're just missing so much.
But the wider we can push that window, even an inch wider, gives us a lot more.
So archaeology is essential, but they can't give us everything.
And there's always going to be new questions and there's always going to be new evidence that gives us new questions.
And thanks to the people who ask and answer these questions, we're better able to understand not just the story of Pompeii written two thousand years ago, but create an original story based on the truth.
Thanks for listening to History This Week, a back pocket studios production in partnership with the History Channel.
To stay updated on all things History This Week, sign up at HistoryThisWeekPodcast .com.
And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at HistoryThisWeek at History .com.
Special thanks to Alison Emerson, Associate Professor of Roman Archaeology at Tulane University and Director of the Pompeii 114 Project.
This episode was produced and sound designed by Ben Dixtein and hosted by me, Alana Casanova -Bergen.
For back pocket studios, our executive producers are Ben Dixtein and David Weisbord.
From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler.
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