Summary: The Other Pompeii

Alyssa Purcell
Art 175
Ms. Scotti
December 2, 2014
The Other Pompeii: Life and Death in Herculaneum, a reflection
Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is very well known throughout the world of archaeology. For over thirty years, he has been a leading expert in the social and cultural history of Rome and has written countless journals and books on his studies. Today, he works with the Herculaneum Conservation Project, a project that aims to protect and conserve the site and artifacts of Herculaneum, while also educating the public about Herculaneum. He is also working at Cambridge as Director of Research of the Faculty of Classics. Professor Wallace-Hadrill presents the BBC documentary The Other Pompeii: Life and Death in Herculaneum, which was
Herculaneum was a city near Pompeii that suffered a similar fate as a result of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The city was blanketed in a thick layer of ash and pumice, which left the city preserved very well and easier for archaeologists to uncover and learn about the culture and lifestyles of the Herculaneum people. Only 10 miles from Pompeii, Professor Wallace-Hadrill brings us to 12 arched vaults where we discover the remains of around 340 victims (around 40 in each vault). We discover among the most recent finds the remains of a toddler with his dog, a girl with silver earrings, and a boy with his mother. Experts were perplexed about why the bodies within the vaults were nearly all women and children, while the bodies near the shoreline were nearly all men. This strange separation can be explained by the time scale of the disaster and the Herculaneum people’s way of organizing themselves during a crisis. When the crisis is sudden, they believed it is important for the strongest to survive, which would be the men. When the crisis is longer, there is more protection for the weak, which is the children and women (like in the Titanic). The Herculaneum people had hours to prepare for the eruption, so that is why the children and women were put into the vaults (for protection), while the men were on the beach trying to come up with
We go back in time and learn about the lifestyles of the Herculaneum people, from food rituals to marriages. We enter their homes, where we see their wooden furniture and the only surviving baby’s cradle from the Roman world. We go into their kitchens and experience their diets (along with the specific ways they ate), which often included a whole fish (including the head). According to Professor Wallace-Hadrill, this way of eating fish still exists in parts of present Rome. We even look at their waste (Yes, human waste), which was perfectly preserved by a layer of ash up to five times deeper than Pompeii. The experts cut open each stool and examined it beneath a microscope. It really makes you think about if people thousands of years from now will do the same to our excrement. Weird. Hopefully, there will be other ways to find out about our diet. It’s weird to think that a long time from now, we could become the subject of some advanced form of a documentary. I bet the Herculaneum or Pompeii people didn’t think we’d be slicing open their waste and dissecting as much as we can about their