Field School in Pompeii

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The work we are doing in Pompeii has been so much fun. When Katie invited me to join the team I simply assumed we would be volunteers, but in actuality, Katie and David are working to create a field school to work here in Pompeii. So while we are helping out as volunteers, the importance is really on educating us in technique and post excavation processing. We are their first group of students for this and hopefully attributing to them blazing a trail with a new field school organization. The house we are working on is the Casa delle Vestali (the House of the Vestals) and was originally one smaller house that eventually bought out many of the surrounding shops and houses and renovated into a larger house, probably owned by a wealthy family. The house is along the edge of one of the walls of the city and was heavily affected by Sulla’s attack in 89 BCE. As a result, they have in storage a small collection of stone missiles that were launched into the house. Those are really cool. There are a lot of really cool things in storage, glass gaming pieces of spectacular color, clear glass window shards (bet you didn’t think about ancient Romans having glass windows. I know it somewhat surprised me cause I’d never thought about it before), tacks, pendants, decorational jewelry from either horse bridals or necklaces, fish hooks, loom weights used in sewing machines and other devices, ….phallic symbols (They were Romans)… worked bone as hinges or needles or makeup tools, glass bottles, and of course lots and lots of pottery. Our work space is in the hallways surrounding the peristyle near the back of the house. In the central garden there are ruins of a pool that was there. It’s kind of unbelievable that that is our office. We started out with the primary processing of pottery pieces, which I believe is still my favorite. David taught us the differences between different types of pottery and we had to sort through multiple bags and organize them into groups, then you keep the pieces that are more significant and accession them with numbers. It’s all very systematic and I won’t go into a ton of detail. The guy I was working with, Nathan, and I sorted through probably a rough estimate of a couple thousands shards in about two half days of work. I loved it. On our second day, the very first bag we got was full of some very big broken pieces and we started to realize that many of them fit together. We spent the next two hours reconstructing about 1/3 of an Amphora exported from Morocco. It was defiantly the most incredible experience I have had and everything we have learned since, while still cool, has not been nearly as exciting. Haha! Unfortunately we were not able to glue it because that process can take days and we still have a lot of work to do. But it did spark an interest in me to learn reconstruction and restoration. The next thing they taught us was how to process small finds; I didn’t enjoy this as much. You basically just take an object, write out the details of it and then measure and sometimes weigh it. We got to see a lot of cool stuff and it’s valuable to learn how to describe certain objects because that can be difficult, but it’s very tedious. Actually, all of the work is tedious; I just enjoy certain acts more than others. We are currently in the process of drawing up the small finds artifacts. I really like doing this! We have to draw it to scale so there is a lot of measuring and drawing then erasing and redoing it all. Plus you have to get multiple angles and some other complicated stuff. I’m in the middle of doing a pendant right now and it is very difficult! There are little designs and curves that are a challenge to draw properly. And I can’t simply sketch, because it is a technical drawing and we need to draw thin, straight lines so that the measurements can be easily ascertained. We still have 2 more weeks, but there are so many trays of bagged material that hasn’t even been touched. And we still have more steps to learn about processing the pottery pieces that were set aside and accessioned. Pompeii only gives teams permission to work for short amounts of time each year, which is unfortunate because it will take quite a few years for all of these finds to get taken care properly. But it is really cool to be included in the process and to be working with three people who have been involved in excavations within multiple sites of the city. Friday Evan took us around and taught us about wall construction and how different techniques and stones tell us when construction was occurring. We went behind a few fences that said off limits and looked at some really cool examples of how people were renovating work spaces and houses. Evan told us about some excavating that he had been apart of a while back in a bakery were they found a whole room buried with a long piece of painted wood, which if you don’t know, is absolutely incredible and unique. They had to bury the room back up, but they will be finishing excavation, I think next year, and unveiling it or something like that. Anyways I could ramble on about all of the cool archaeological stuff I am learning about Pompeii, but then this blog would become much too long and probably somewhat boring. So that is what I am learning and doing in Pompeii. I am so grateful for the opportunity and still shocked that I get to spend three weeks working in an ancient house playing with people’s personal items from thousands of years ago, and I have some serious high hopes that I will get paid to do this someday.

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Photos

Putting my first pieces together!

Part of the amphora

More of the amphora...

The rim and the bottom of the amphora

This is what we were putting back together.

Our workplace.

The pool in the center of where we do our work.