If you live in London then it is very likely that you have already spotted posters for the British Museums Spring 2013 exhibition ‘Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum’. The catastrophic end of these Roman towns has always fascinated me and I for one cannot wait to get through the doors.
Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum will be at the British Museum, 28 March – 29 September 2013
The exhibition will be the first ever held on these important cities at the British Museum and is the result of a collaboration with the Archaeological Superintendency of Naples and Pompeii, bringing together over 250 fascinating objects, both recent discoveries and celebrated finds from earlier excavations. Many of these objects have never before been seen outside Italy.
Pompeii and Herculaneum, two cities on the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, were buried by a catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in just 24 hours in AD 79. This event ended the life of the cities but at the same time preserved them until rediscovery by archaeologists nearly 1700 years later. The excavation of these cities has given us unparallelled insight into Roman life.
How an erupting Vesuvius would have looked
Owing to their different locations Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried in different ways and this has affected the preservation of materials at each site. Herculaneum was a small seaside town whereas Pompeii was the industrial hub of the region. Work continues at both sites and recent excavations at Herculaneum have uncovered beautiful and fascinating artefacts.
A baker was making bread as usual the day the volcano erupted – 81 loaves were found in his oven in Pompeii.
Discoveries show people also ate eggs, cheese, broad beans, olives, peaches, walnuts and seafood.
The exhibition will give visitors a taste of the daily life of the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum, from the bustling street to the family home. The domestic space is the essential context for people’s lives, and allows us to get closer to the Romans themselves. This exhibition will explore the lives of individuals in Roman society, not the classic figures of films and television, such as emperors, gladiators and legionaries, but businessmen, powerful women, freed slaves and children.
The exhibition will include casts from in and around Pompeii of some of the victims of the eruption. As morbid as it sounds this is one of the features I am most intrigued by.
The 300C heat in Pompeii meant tissue survived long enough to create cavities in the ground, from which the casts were made. Above is the family of four, left, found cowering under their stairs – a terrified toddler on his mum’s lap and his baby brother or sister lying dead nearby.
The majority of archaeology is the remains or rubbish that our ancestors left behind. Pompeii is a moment captured in time and gives us not only a rare snapshot into domestic life, but into the lives of the people who lived there and their last moments on earth. When you see the cast of a mother cradling her child you realise that these Romans were not so different to us. The fundamentals of human life have always been the same. Very few examples throughout history have been able to offer us this kind of insight and I hope the exhibition will allow visitors to step inside the shoes of the freedman who said goodnight to his family, never realising it would be their last.
Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, British Museum, 28 March – 29 September 2013, Reading Room, Sponsored by Goldman Sachs
©2013