Layered
Ground-penetrating
radar reveal a gazebo-like
structure and other renova-
tions below the surface
of a large, public atrium.Poppaea Sabina. But we don’t know much about the women
who planned dinner parties. We know even less about the
slaves who ran errands on the sidewalks of Via di Nola.
That’s why a researcher like Barone might be as excited
to find a bit of pavement as his 18th-century counterparts
were to find marble-lined villas.
GPR surveys like his have already upended long-held
assumptions about the city, including the history of one of
its most visited landmarks. Located on the Via Stabiana on
the southern edge of town, the Quadriporticus is an enor-
mous open-air atrium, about an acre in total, surrounded
by a colonnade and dozens of small rooms. For years, inves-
tigators assumed, based on a single fresco of weapons, that
it had been a gladiator barracks. Ellis and Poehler’s GPR
analy sis, however, offered a more compelling clue: AboutWhen his team published one of the first GPR surveys of
Pompeii in 2011, they focused on an unexcavated patch
of land around the northern walls of the city. Studying the
readout for anomalies, they detected what appeared to be
two walls lining a Roman road. The tops of both were buried
nearly 23 feet deep in the ash. The results were so promising
that he wants his next target to be the entire city of Rome,
where he could use his handheld GPR to help create an ac-
curate map of what the place looked like millennia ago,
without disturbing a single brick.THE COMMON PICTURE OF POMPEII is one of a thriving
beach town for vacationing soldiers and the Roman one-
percenters, where lavish summer villas with tiled verandas
opened to ocean breezes. But archaeologists wielding these
new tools provide a glimpse of proletarian life that their pre-
decessors historically ignored. We know the names of some
wealthy residents like Cicero, as well as Nero’s second wife,archaeologists for decades (it revealed traces
of what might be 60 additional buried pillars
at Stonehenge, and the remains of King Rich-
ard III under a Leicester, U.K., parking lot),
it’s only recently proved its worth in mapping
geology like what exists in Pompeii. Despite
uncertainty that the pulses would retain their fi-
delity through deep ash, which can impede the
signals, Barone’s research has found the region
quite compatible with the tech. He was pleased,
he says, to discover that “you have a fast pene-
tration of waves into volcanic sediments.”POEHLER^AND^ELLIS2014:^ FIG.^4
,^ FIG.^7
94 FALL 2019 • POPSCI.COM