THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 41
the years immediately before the cat-
aclysm. The décor—now nearly two
thousand years old—had been freshly
installed when the volcano exploded.
S
ince the remains of Pompeii and
the other ancient Roman settle-
ments inundated by Vesuvius first
came to light, some three hundred
years ago, discovery has often gone
hand in hand with destruction. An
eighteenth-century visitor to the site
of Herculaneum described the meth-
ods used by the workmen under the
command of Roque Joachim Alcu-
bierre, the artillery engineer who had
been appointed to oversee the excava-
tion by the Bourbon monarchy then
ruling the Kingdom of Naples. Unlike
Pompeii, Herculaneum was not blan-
keted with ash and pumice; it was
buried only by a series of pyroclastic
flows, which hardened into a layer of
deep rock, through which workmen
could dig narrow tunnels only with
great difficulty.
The workmen of that era, upon find-
ing a mansion or other building, would
extract any objects of obvious value,
such as marble statues, bronze lamps,
and decorative mosaics, without tak-
ing note of their location or of the
architectural context. Because of the
treacherous conditions—among them,
inadequate light and air—workmen
did not trouble to excavate doors. They
broke through walls to get from one
room to another, regardless of what
decorations in the adjoining room they
might be destroying. At Pompeii, it is
not uncommon to see a wall with a
hole smashed through it, including the
wall perpendicular to the Leda and the
Swan, where another painting has been
partially destroyed—the handiwork of
heedless laborers in centuries past, who
dug down and rooted around through
the ash and lapilli, which is shallower
and easier to penetrate than the rock
of Herculaneum.
Alcubierre operated with barbaric
efficiency, especially when it came to
wall paintings that his workers hacked
off from their brick underpinnings.
When a painting was deemed insuf-
ficiently different from those already
unearthed, workmen pulverized it un-
derground. These excavations were fo-
cussed on finding masterpieces to aug-
ment royal or aristocratic collections,
rather than on discovering the mun-
dane objects of everyday life—or ma-
terial evidence of the complexities of
Roman social structures. Today’s ar-
cheologists are happy to retrieve beau-
tiful objects, but they are also intent
on finding clues that will help them
better understand how slavery func-
tioned in the Roman world, or how
women could acquire power.
Even the best-intentioned arche-
ologists are only as good as their meth-
odologies, and the primitive approaches
of eighteenth-century pioneers are
sometimes enough to make a modern
observer shudder. In the seventeen-
fifties, a large villa near Herculaneum
was discovered, and archeologists were
so transfixed by its handsome court-
yards and garden that they barely reg-
istered the lumps of blackened char-
coal that workmen were tossing aside.
Many had crumbled before the lumps
were belatedly identified as charred
scrolls of papyrus. Did they record any
lost works of antiquity? The first ef-
forts to render the scrolls legible—by
In the ruins of Pompeii, discovery has often gone hand in hand with destruction.
MICHELE AMORUSO / GETTY
