Last Moments
of Pompeii and
Herculaneum, A.D. 79
Touring Pompeii in 1981,
a group studies victims
of the volcanic erup-
tion of Mount Vesuvius
that entombed two
wealthy Roman towns.
“Suddenly we are faced
with human beings out
of the dim past at their
very moment of death,”
wrote archaeologist
Amedeo Maiuri, who
was in charge of Pom-
peii’s excavations from
1924 to 1961. “Some
show an attitude of
fierce struggle against
their fate; others recline
peacefully as though
in sleep.”
DAVID HISERnew discipline also ushered in an
unprecedented era of discovery
that revolutionized the understand-
ing of our species’ rich diversity, as
well as our common humanity.
If this seems an exaggeration,
imagine a world without archae-
ology. No luxurious Pompeii. No
breathtaking Thracian gold. No
Maya cities looming out of dense
jungle. A Chinese emperor’s terra-
cotta army would still be hidden
beneath the dark soil of a farm-
er’s field.
Without archaeology, we would
know little about the world’s earli-
est civilizations. Lacking a Rosetta
stone, we would still puzzle over the
enigmatic symbols on the walls of
Egyptian tombs and temples. The
world’s first literate and urban
society, which flourished in Mes-
opotamia, would be known only
dimly through the Bible. And theTHE URGE TO UNCOVER BURIED WEALTH has obsessed countless
searchers, enriching a few and driving others to the brink
of madness.
“There are certain men who spend nearly all their lives in
seeking for—kanûz—hidden treasures,” wrote the British
traveler Mary Eliza Rogers after she visited Palestine in the
middle of the 19th century. “Some of them become maniacs,
desert their families, and though they are often so poor that
they beg their way from door to door, and from village to
village, they believe themselves to be rich.”
Not all the fortune hunters whom Rogers came across were
desperate vagabonds. She also encountered sahiri, roughly
translated as necromancers, “who are believed to have
the power of seeing objects concealed in the earth.” These
esteemed clairvoyants, often women, entered a trance that
Rogers said allowed them to describe in minute detail the
hiding places of valuable goods.
Archaeology transformed those “objects concealed in the
earth” from simple treasures into powerful tools that allow
us to glimpse the hidden past.
At first, the fledgling science emerging in Rogers’s day
differed little from old-fashioned plundering, as European
colonialists competed to fill their display cabinets with
ancient statues and jewelry from faraway lands. But theTREASURE
IS AS OLD AS
THE FIRST
PLUNDERED
GRAVE.
BY ANDREW LAWLERDIGGING FOR
46 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC