An eruption of Mount Vesuvius (background) in A.D. 79 buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii under volcanic ash.
For the first time in 19 centuries, a breath of life is wafting through the ghostly streets of Pompeii. Under the guidance of a dozen architects, squads of construction workers dig and drill in its ruins, shoring up eroded facades and installing drainage pipes. Engineers and biologists convene over morning coffee, sharing notes and posing questions.
Rebirth is taking shape here, a new era for a city whose sudden burial in volcanic ash two millennia ago left behind a unique but fragile record of everyday business in the ancient world.
What is emerging from mountains of data is a remarkable mirror of our own times. Pompeii in the first century was a community of multicultural neighborhoods speaking a babel of languages, lunching in fast-food restaurants, and indulging at home on costly imported delicacies.
The ancient Roman town of Pompeii is one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites, and its exquisite villas, buried by volcanic ash in A.D. 79, have been the subject of study since the 18th century. Now, modern imaging and chemical analysis of human remains found at the site are adding depth to the picture of how Pompeii’s inhabitants lived.
A LEGACY OF DISASTERS
Pompeii has been a byword for catastrophe since 79 A.D., when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted, killing most of the city’s inhabitants. After serious excavations began halfway through the 19th century, this storied city on the Bay of Naples was rocked by four major earthquakes and an endless succession of man-made disasters.
Allied bombings in 1943 shattered important buildings. Shoddy peacetime “restorations” by organized crime-controlled building firms did more damage than the bombs. Staff and budget cutbacks during two world wars and four economic crashes, most recently the worldwide financial meltdown of 2008, left much of Pompeii crumbling and dangerous. Feral dogs haunted its courtyards. Incessant flooding ate away at its foundations
.By the end of 2010, when the famous “House of the Gladiators” suddenly toppled, only 13 percent of the site’s 110 visible acres remained accessible to visitors. (Another 54 acres have never been uncovered.) The number of buildings open to the public had been reduced to ten, down from 64 in 1956.
Earlier this year Italy’s elite cultural protection squad launched a surprise police raid on a warehouse in Geneva, Switzerland, that recovered fragments of unique Pompeii frescoes.
Centuries of neglect and abuse left Pompeii crumbling and dangerous. By the end of 2010 only 10 buildings were open to the public, down from 64 in 1956.
THE GREAT POMPEII PROJECT
Osanna and his colleagues now preside over one of the most ambitious archaeological enterprises in history. Formally known as the Great Pompeii Project, its goal is the transformation of a chronic disaster into a peerless showcase by 2017. It is to be a state-of-the-art laboratory for what Osanna calls “global archaeology,” an approach that marshals a vast interdisciplinary arsenal of scientific, scholarly, and practical skills in the study of ancient sites.
More than 200 experts and technicians are at work in Pompeii’s ruins. In addition to 12 architects and 12 archaeologists, the team includes bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, painters, carpenters, photographers, dentists, radiologists, biologists, geologists, mapping technicians, computer scientists, and experts in art restoration. There are also medical engineers skilled in the use of advanced diagnostic equipment, and hydro-engineers to stave off the flooding.
Anthropologists are composing precise genetic profiles of victims. Paleobotanists are studying 2,000-year old remnants of food for clues on Pompeian dining preferences. Demographers are collating medical findings with a wide variety of other data, assembling a de facto census of the vanished community.
The project’s headline innovation has been the use of computerized axial tomography, popularly known as CAT scans, which employ radio waves and magnetic fields to generate detailed internal images of the body.
The procedure builds on earlier pioneering work by Giuseppe Fiorelli, Osanna’s most illustrious predecessor as superintendent (1863-1875), who injected high-quality plaster into the blocks of solidified ash that encased Pompeii’s dead, yielding evocative casts of their corpses. Some 86 of these casts and their human contents, a representative sample of the city’s population, are undergoing painstaking restoration and analyses, based on DNA samples and three-dimensional laser scans as well as tomography.
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