LThe aim is to improve conservation by remodelling the excavation front and acquiring new archaeological data.
In Pompeii, excavations are underway again in an area covering approximately 3.200 square meters, almost an entire block of the ancient city buried in 79 AD by Vesuvius. The project is part of a broader approach that, developed during the years of the Great Pompeii Project, aims to rectify and resolve the hydrogeological and conservation problems of the excavation fronts, i.e. the border between the excavated and unexplored parts of the ancient city. The latter amounts to approximately 15 hectares of blocks and houses still buried under lapilli and ash, almost a third of the ancient settlement.
The setting of the new excavation, located in Insula 10 of Regio IX, along Via di Nola, is therefore the same as that already implemented in the excavation of Regio V during the years 2018-2020 which, under the direction of the then director, Massimo Osanna, saw the emergence of the house of Orion, the house with Garden and the Themopolium.
In addition to improving the conditions of conservation and protection of the ancient structures through the arrangement of the excavation fronts, which have always been elements of vulnerability due to the pressure of the ground on the ancient walls and the flow of rainwater, the new excavations make use of the employment of the various professional figures of archaeology, including archaeologists, archaeobotanists, numismatic volcanologists, ancient topographers, as well as architects, engineers and geologists, to extract the maximum information and data from the stratigraphic investigation operations.
“Excavating in Pompeii is an enormous responsibility – declares the director of the site, Gabriel Zuchtriegel –. Excavation is a non-repeatable operation, what is excavated is excavated forever. Therefore, we must document and analyze each find and all the stratigraphic relationships well and think immediately about how to secure and restore what we find.”
The excavation is still at the beginning, but the wall crests of the upper floors of the ancient buildings are already beginning to emerge, including a house, transformed in its final stages into a fullonica (laundry) and excavated already around 1912, and a house with an oven and upper cell. In the even higher levels, archaeologists have documented a series of holes dug in the ground in perhaps more recent years and presumably functional to the agricultural use of the land or perhaps linked to the lapilli quarrying activities that the area underwent in modern times.
Eighteenth-nineteenth century views show how the plateau above the excavations was used for various agricultural crops, between wooded areas and rural buildings and farmers' greenhouses were still present until 2015. A landscape, the historical one of the decades of the rediscovery of Pompeii, that the Park wants to enhance and tell also through another project that aims to redevelop the green areas of the site and its surroundings. In these very weeks the selection procedure of a partner for the cultivation of the Park's vineyards is underway within a public-private partnership, which includes the expansion of the cultivated areas, and in the future also the implementation of olive groves, orchards and community gardens.
“The size of a catastrophe is also measured by the possibility of forgetting it, of letting it fall into oblivion. – comments the director – And that landscape of crops, woods and pastures that was born in the centuries after the eruption on the site of the ancient city, is like a small comfort compared to the terrible tragedy of 79 AD that destroyed the entire city of Pompeii in two days. The memory of the tragedy faded, life returned. So much so that after the excavations began, in 1748, it took 15 years to understand that they were excavating in Pompeii and not in Stabia.”
Article published by Regina Ada Scarico on February 27, 2023 - 16:11 PM
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