town. In the setup, players can walk through the space and experience
what it was like to watch a pantomime in Nero’s reign.
Inside the simulation, which feels something like an 8-bit (but highly
accurate) version of Assassin’s Creed, players enter the four-sided gar-
den, called a peristyle, where Romans enjoyed meals alfresco. Guests
would have reclined on couches along the perimeter to eat; performers
might have begun the show on a stage in front of dramatic wall paint-
ings of Bacchus, the god of wine and theater.
Mouse-clicking their way through the colonnaded garden, players
pass between rows of manicured shrubs, en route to the central foun-
tain. As Hughes shows off the scene, she explains that watching people
“walk” through the space helps her speculate about how actual Roman
aesthetes might have meandered. “We think of a 19th-century dining
idea of theater, that everyone would be seated and quiet,” she says, citing
what she’s been able to glean from ancient writings. “I might get up and
move around,” she muses. Using her model, she can see how that could
have played out: which pathways or vantage points people use, and how
the changing light might affect where and when they sat.
More important, Hughes has brought to life a social tipping point in
Roman history. Shifting social norms had allowed theater to enter the
home and the realm of women. Her model is one way we can glimpse
inside this world, and learn about life beyond the Forum.IN THE COMING DECADES, the noninvasive techniques we use to en-
vision ancient civilizations on Earth could help us chart new worlds in
outer space. “No nation has the right to alter a place that we are trying
to understand and explore,” says Lisa Pratt, who heads NASA’s Office of
Planetary Protection, which creates guidelines for the agency’s probes
and landers. She encourages engineers to refine nondestructive archae-
ological tools like GPR and drone imaging so we’ll leave no trace as we
search for signs of life on distant planets. “These are instruments that
are off-the-shelf for studying Earth, but we want to get them ready for
launch and deployment in other planetary environments,” she adds.
Cosmos-bound variations are already in the works. A GPR device
called RIMFAX, for example, will head to the Red Planet on NASA’s
Mars 2020 mission. It won’t be looking for lost civilizations there, but
for a lost ecosystem. “We want to find potentially habitable environ-
ments, where there might once have been some life,” says Rebecca
Ghent, a University of Toronto geoscientist who worked on the craft.
The rover will explore an area scientists speculate could have once been
a river delta, full of fast-flowing streams of ice melt. They’ll watch for
telltale diagonal layers of sediment that hint at sand left behind by flash
floods or seasonally swollen streams.
The probe is quite similar to the kind of GPR rig that Barone’s team
from the American University used to see the road buried outside Pom-
peii’s walls. But on Mars, a single instrument will need to sweep through
the range of frequencies to scan above-ground terrain and hopefully
also peer as deep as 30 feet below the red surface. Ghent credits “a trick
of computer processing” with allowing them to modulate the signal
RIMFAX uses, and collect clues about Mars’ past.
The most profound lesson investigators will apply to space from a place
like Pompeii, though, is how to think in deep time. Walking on 2,000-year-
old streets, temporal distances collapse, bringing both the far future and
distant past into focus. Hopefully our descendants could one day wander
Martian cities, quietly teeming with life that survived because we took the
time to study the regolith before drilling into it. Exploration is no longer
a game of planting flags and grabbing loot. It’s about preserving what we
find for humans (or otherworldly friends) millennia from now.1.5 feet below the surface sits a circular structure
that was once the foundation for a large, central
gazebo. The form matches ones found locally
and others at outdoor markets in Rome. This
suggests that the ancient square might have
been filled with vendors selling fermented fish,
sauces, and wine. Maybe it wasn’t a place for en-
tertaining the rich but for feeding the masses.
The more investigators pore over their new
troves of digital data, the more they’re able
to add texture to the portrait of everyday life.
Ellis, for instance, studied the maps he and
Poehler built to count and catalog Pompeii’s
160 tabernas, revealing the city as a thriving
center for street life. And now, thanks to chemi-
cal analy ses, he knows what people ate in these
eateries. Cesspits in two spots showed that one
served meals with imported spices and many
kinds of fish, while the other offered up Roman-
style comfort foods like sausage and cheese.
PG 95
POPSCI — FALL 2019“The trend is to look for the big, the mighty, the
unusual,” Ellis says with a rueful smile. “What
we do is look for the usual.”
Similarly, Lisa Hughes, a classics profes-
sor at the University of Calgary, is re-creating
scenes from domestic life, and exploring the
interactions between the women, foreign-
ers, and slaves who would have populated
it. She and her collaborators have used the
popu lar Unity developer platform (it under-
pins hits like Super Mario Run and Pokemon
Go) and digital photographs to build a virtual-
reality simulation of plays staged in the court-
yard of the House of the Golden Cupids, a
well-preserved home in a fashionable part of
WHAT LIES BENEATH