Archaeology Hotspot Italy by Maja Gori & Alessandro Pintucci

Author:Maja Gori & Alessandro Pintucci
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2020-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.9. Herculaneum, a view of the port area. On the right it is possible to appreciate the dimensions of the tuff rock covering the city. Sarahhoa [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]

In Herculaneum we can also observe for the first time residential and commercial multi-floor structures. The so-called Insula Orientalis secunda is indeed a kind of four-floor building. Each floor was added progressively as the demand for space grew and it became impossible to expand the buildings horizontally.

Having been destroyed in 79 AD, Herculaneum, like Pompeii, presents the characteristics that towns would have assumed in that period: after the great fire in Rome of 64 AD, Emperor Nero made a law about city planning rules, to reduce the possibility of fires and collapses. One of these rules was a ban on building balconies without correct safety systems on the road, such as pillars or columns. That’s why we can still encounter many of these structures while walking around the city.

Visiting—or digging in—Pompeii or Herculaneum is like being in a freeze frame from the past. In one night, the survivor inhabitants of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis were forced to flee from their houses, leaving behind all their possessions, and suddenly interrupting the actions they were performing. The houses, the shops, the temples, the public buildings, even the food they were eating, remain almost two-thousand years from that night.

The individual stories of the dead become in the eyes of the historian and the archaeologist collective events, as in the case of the three hundred people who died asphyxiated together on the pier of Herculaneum, while waiting for a boat to take them to safety offshore. Pliny the Elder, the famous writer, driven by his scientific curiosity, died on the beach of Stabiae having come too close to the place of the eruption.

Any archaeologist who has worked in Pompeii can tell you how thrilling it is to find items from 23 August 79 AD abandoned on the counter of a tavern, or observe tangible signs of illegal constructions made following the 62 AD earthquake, or discover a shell used to produce red dye while excavating the sewing system of a domus transformed into a fullonica (laundry and dyeing facility).

Such an enormous archaeological heritage, of course, has huge restoration and conservation problems as well as enormous monetary costs for research efforts and daily commitment. The archaeological parks of Pompeii and Herculaneum were declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1997. As is well known, this organization sets strict quality parameters for a site to remain on the list.

From 2001 the Archaeological Park of Herculaneum had been engaged in an international project for the conservation and restoration of the site, in collaboration with the British School at Rome and the Packard Humanities Institute. The latter invested more than 15 million euros in the project to monitor and restore the structures, which are highly degraded and in serious risk of collapsing. The project was a success and allowed the park to emerge from its state

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.