The one where I get stuck in an ruined city

On August 24, 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius, an active volcano in the vicinity of modern Naples in Italy, erupted and buried the surrounding settlements of Pompeii and Herculaneum under a mile of rock and ash, killing up to 25,000 people.

Pompeii remained buried until the 16th Century, Herculaneum until the 18th. In 1804, the first real excavations of Pompeii began to uncover the city. Large scale excavations of the ruined city continue to this day making Pompeii one of the largest and most famous archaeological sites in the world.

The plan was to get to Pompeii from Rome and back again in one day. Pompeii is closest to Naples, about 2.5 hours from Rome. We arrived at Termini, the central Roman train station, at about 9am on Monday. We struggled through buying our tickets, and spent about 20 minutes with a dictionary trying to read the Italian tickets and figure out where were supposed to be waiting for the train and where we would sit once it arrived.

We boarded the train and found our seats, only to be almost immediately yelled at in Italian that we were in the wrong seats. We tried to show the two ladies our tickets and prove that we were in the right place, but they just kept saying “No, no!” And so, assuming we must be wrong, we left the seats and went up the carriage to ask an employee and another man who spoke English. Both pointed us back to where we had come from. Finally, we squeezed our way through small, crowded hallways to the seats we had started with. The ladies were gone and our seats were now vacant. We sat down and I watched the Italian countryside through the rain on my window for most of the journey (punctuated by naps, of course, because it was quite early still.)

With the train and a transfer to the Metro in Naples, we got to Pompeii at about 1pm. The site is open until 5pm, so we had enough time to see most of it (not all, though, because it really is an entire ancient city.)

It was pouring rain by the time we arrived, and though it was frustrating to have to hold up my umbrella and my camera at the same time, it also made the site a lot more interesting to me. Pompeii is a major tourist location, and I’ve heard that in the summer it’s packed beyond belief. Since it was the off season, and since it was raining, Pompeii really did look like an abandoned, ruined city. A city of the dead. You could walk several streets before running into another person. It gave a very surreal, ghostly aspect to the site.

The streets of Pompeii are still paved with cobblestones and still have the stones in place for the pedestrians to cross without stepping in puddles or debris. In the rain, they were more rivers than streets and we were glad for the raised sidewalks on either side. We wandered the streets of Pompeii, walking around a city that was frozen in time in 79AD. It was amazing to see the way a town looked in the Roman Empire. With wall paintings, mosaics and graffiti still in tact, it was easy to imagine yourself a Pompeian in the houses and courtyards.

When they excavated Pompeii, they didn’t find dead bodies. They were incinerated in the heat. But the way the ash and rock had fallen created pockets of air in the shape of where the bodies had been. Therefore, archaeologists were able to make plaster casts of the people who had died in Pompeii. In the summer I understand that many of these are left in situ, among the buildings of the city so that you can see where they died. In the off season, however, the casts are kept in an open storage area.

As someone studying archaeology, Pompeii was a wonder to see. I have been reading in textbooks for years of all the things we’ve found out from Pompeii. Because it was frozen in time, it alloys us to see how a Roman city would have looked in the 1st Century AD. Graffiti, wall paintings, amphorae and shops can tells us countless things about the Roman way of life.

Needless to say, we spent as much time as possible at Pompeii.

At around 4:25 we made our way back to the main gate to buy the guidebook. The last admission was at 4:30, so we ran out quickly to get the book and then nipped back in. An employee told us not to go too far, since they were closing in half an hour. We told him that we were going to go see the Villa of the Mysteries and exit that way.

And so, we walked across the city to the Villa. We got there at about 4:50, just in time to see the Villa and exit on time. But when we were done looking around the Villa, we realized that we couldn’t find the way out the book had described. There was a fence that kept us from going any further past the Villa.

We decided to go back up the hill to see if we had missed the exit on our way in. A man told us that we had to go back towards the main entrance. We were confused, but we continued up the hill anyway.

After walking for a while, we realized that the path we were on wasn’t going to lead us to an exit. By now it was 5:20 and dark, and there was no one else in Pompeii. Everyone had left for the day. We still had no idea how to get out.

We had two options, either to go back down into the city and keep walking to the main entrance and hope we could still get out that way, or go back to the Villa of the Mysteries and continue to search for that exit. Standing on top of the hill, we could see Vesuvius, the city of Naples and the intense dark of the dead city below. The only house nearby had dogs that were barking loudly and, in my anxious mind, angrily. I was worried we would have to stay in Pompeii all night.

We decided to go back to the Villa and try our chances there.

When we got back to the Villa it was about 5:40. We jumped two fences to get past it, trying to follow the signs that said “Uscita” (Italian for exit.) Finally, walking around with only the flashlight on my keychain for light, we found the exit. A woman in the building at the exit saw our flashlight and opened her window. She started yelling in a mix of Italian and English that they were closed, we had to leave. I yelled back “I know! We’re trying! Uscita! Uscita!”

Finally, we got out of Pompeii and didn’t have to spend the night with only two toblerones and a package of Fruit Joys, possibly ending up food for the famous Pompeii stray dogs.

Of course, on the way down the hill in the dark I tripped and went over on my ankle and I ended up having to buy a Tensor (/Ace) bandage to keep me walking all over Rome for the week.

They built a wall…

…the Romans, that is. Starting in 122 CE (or AD if you’d like). They built a wall from one side of Britain to the other, to regulate travel and keep the south safe from Barbarica - in this case, Scotland.

In Rome, the army is power. Caesar came to power because he had support of the troops. When Octavian wanted to claim his inheritance, he bought off the army first. Any ruler worth his salt kept the army happy. And busy. Because a bored army is recipe for rebellion.

Emperor Hadrian was smart enough to recognize this, and put them to work building a wall, some forts and a milecastle every Roman mile. Sure, it was a lot about defence and transportation too. But the most important this is that the legions stationed in the North were too busy to come around and repeat the events of 69 CE (the year of four Emperors, all to fresh in the Roman mind).

Newcastle Upon Tyne stands at the Eastern-most edge of Hadrian’s Wall. Within a short journey is several major forts (Segedenum, Arbeia, Vindolanda, Birdoswald) and some of the most important Roman excavations going on now.

Being in Northeast, I’ve had a chance to visit some Roman ruins. We went out to Vindolanda about a week and a half ago. At Vindolanda, they found the only surviving examples of Roman papyri. Written in strange cursive Latin, the Vindolanda tablets show us daily life on the Roman frontier. From birthday party invitations to requests for leave, the tablets offer an amazing insight.

They’ve already done extensive excavations at Vindolanda, and they’re in the process of doing more. You can see a bathhouse, a granary, and several other buildings from the fort and the town that grew up around it to cater to the Roman army. You can see the complex system of wells and waterways that made it possible to supply water to almost every building. You can also see the remains of how they kept themselves warm in the cold Northeastern winter - the heated floors.

The second place I went was Birdoswald, where one of my professors is leading an excavation on a Roman cemetery. He led us through the excavation, and then we walked out to the Wall and followed it for a few miles to see a milecastle and a Roman bridge.

So I have a new goal. There is a path that follows the 80 miles of Hadrian’s Wall, from coast to coast. There are hotels and hostels on the way. I want to walk the Wall…. in the summer. Apparently it only takes about a week to get from Newcastle to the West coast.

There is no reason and the truth is plain to see

Driving down the highway, the pavement disappears beneath me and I have the extraordinary sense of going somewhere. The street lights sparkle against the night sky, I streak past the few other cars, always going just a little bit too fast. There is a moment of silence as the song switches on my playlist. The first chords of A Whiter Shade of Pale float through the air and I smile to myself.

My head is full of imaginary scenarios. Me rolling all my clothes into small bundles and boarding a plane. The first time I set foot in Newcastle, lost, confused and slightly stressed, but so full of the future. Buying sheets for my bed, decorating a small but cute one bedroom apartment. Stepping into my first class, nervous but excited, meeting all of the other MA students. Walking along the river, watching fall turn into my first English winter and actually missing the snow. I see a favourite pub, with dim lights and Newcastle Brown on tap. I imagine my favourite cafe, with brownies for bad days and lattés for early mornings.

I picture myself on my first excavation, sweaty with the dust sticking to me, but smiling. I imagine finding that one thing that catches my attention on a random day in class - my thesis in the making. I see the Colisseum, the Parthenon, the Pantheon, the Acropolis.

I imagine what it will be like to be doing something I love everyday, for the first time in my life. What it will be like to be unemployed, to devote my time only to my studies.

And I smile.

The Philosophy of Restoration

A number of things today have me thinking about the restoration architecture and archaeology. In my Intro to Archaeology class we watched a movie about the restoration of the Parthenon. And I just went to a lecture at school by Mary Beard about the restoration of Pompeii.

My first introduction to the idea of restoration was at Pinhey’s last summer. The house at Pinhey’s was restored by the Canadian architect Julian Smith (who also restored the Vimy Memorial) in the 1990s. This is the part of the tour where I would discuss the philosophies of restoration. At Pinhey’s, a lot of the house was left as it was found. This way, you can see the deterioration over time. The deterioration is part of the story. It’s a story of a the gradual decline of the wealthiest family in March Township. Parts of the house needed to be restored in order to perserve the structural value and to allow it to be used as a regulation public place. But the philosophy of Julian Smith, as with most modern restoration architects, was to make it very obvious which parts were new material and which were original. You do this by not matching paints exactly or by not finishing the wood. So you get an idea of what it would have looked like, but you are changing the original material. This works very well at Pinhey’s, since the family didn’t do any major restorations while they were living there, due to their decline of wealth. At Billings it’s a different case. The family renovated and modernized the house themselves while living there, which drastically changed the original structure of the house. Because of this, the outside of the Billings Estate National Historic Site looks old, but the inside looks fairly new, with white washed walls and such. Personally, I prefer the authenticity of Pinhey’s, because when you walk in the front door you’re essentially seeing what they saw 150 years ago.

The movie we watched in class this morning was a documentary about the ongoing restoration of the Parthenon. It was very interesting. Essentially, in order to keep the Parthenon standing at all, it was in need of a major restoration. But they’ve had alot of problems with it. You see, the Athenians didn’t build the Parthenon to be straight. They built it to look straight. This means that all of the lines are slightly curved, creating the optical illusion of perfection, though it is actually imperfect. They didn’t care about how was but how it looked. Which says a lot about the Athenians. This, however, leads to another problem. Each column is made in several marble pieces. But they are all different, by fractions and millimeters. That means each “piece” of the Parthenon only fits in one spot. They have to be very precise when creating the supporting pieces in order to get it just right. They’ve been at it for 30 years. It took the Athenians 7 years (under Pericles, during the Athenian Empire) to make the Parthenon. And, aren’t we supposed to be more advanced than them? Apparently not. As the documentary says, not only did they have a complex system of measurement but they also had tools created in their mastery of mettalurgy that we can’t replicate today.

This afternoon, Mary Beard was telling us about the Allied bombing of Pompeii in 1943. It destroyed many parts of the ruins of Pompeii, and as a result a lot of Pompeii isn’t an original but a restoration. Beard said that as a society, we turn a blind eye to the restoration of major sites like Pompeii and Hadrian’s Wall. Because we want to. We want to believe that this is our “unmediated contact” with the Roman World. That we’re seeing what they saw. When really, a lot of the restorations, such as that of Pompeii and those done at Knossos by Arthur Evans, are more of a product of what we imagine the ancient world to be. It says as much about our society as it does about theirs, maybe more.

“As our vision of the ancient world changes, so does what we choose to find at Pompeii.” - Mary Beard.

The Emperor’s Body, Ancient Poop and More Reasons to Buy Shoes

I bought a couple of archaeology magazines about a week ago, and I’m going through them slowly, finding some interesting stuff.

Apparently, the statue of Emperor Hadrian that the British Museum has had since the 1860s is actually pieces of three or more statues plastered together. When the museum’s conservators took the layer of plaster off around Hadrian’s neck, they discovered that the head was too small for the body, the neck didn’t fit together. Also, apparently, the hands are from different statues too. This seems a good way to create the perfect man, I think. Simply plaster the best pieces together. According to the Bristish Museum website, it was the museum staff who put the different pieces together, on assumption that all the pieces were found near each other in Libya.

Also, they were able to prove that humans lived in North America over 12,000 years ago. How? Poop, of course. Archaeologists apparently found the a dried piece of shit from 14,300 years ago in a cave in Oregon. They’re actually able to isolate human DNA from this. As Kristen asked: How did they know it was poop? It looks like a rock to me…

I’ve bought three new pairs of shoes in the last month. I used to hate shoe shopping - apparently now I’m obsessed. But it’s okay, because it’s genetic. Turns out that humans have been wearing shoes for 40,000 years. An anthropologist analyzed the toe bones of a skeleton found in China and found that the shape of the foot indicated that this person wore shoes. Apparently, if you walk bare foot your whole life your middle toes curl under for traction. But not shoe wearers, they put all the pressure on the big toe and the rest of the toe bones are less developed. See, now I can tell myself that if I don’t buy shoes, my middle toes might curl under….