Pompeii FAQs
There are a number of questions that are always asked about Pompeii and being a part of a dig in Pompeii. They are:

1. Hasnt it all been excavated already?
2. Find anything good?
3. Find any dead bodies?
4. Do you really live in tents?
5. Are you afraid of the volcano?
6. Isn't digging really tedious?
7. There's a modern Pompei?
8. What's the deal with the spelling? Is it with one or two I's?
9. Why do you only dig during the summer?
(This is only a start, ask me more if you have other questions.)

And answers...

1. No, by no means. Pompeii was first discovered in the late 16th century and 'excavated' of the volcanic debris and ash in the mid 18th centrury. These digs only removed material down to the floor level of the city when the volcano buried it, the 79 AD level. My dig starts there, at that floor level, and goes down, excavating to find out how the block developed over time to end up as it was when the volcano buried it. Property lines changed, use of space changed, and there is evidence for all of that in the dirt. So while 2/3rds of the ancient city has been uncovered to the 79AD level, very very little of this area has undergone proper archaeological excavation below that level. The remaining third of the still-buried city will remain as such since the Soprintendenza of Pompeii passed a law forbidding further excavation of still-buried areas. A very good move from a conservation standpoint, and I'll go into that further later.

2. Yes. Dig most places in Italy and you cant help but find stuff. Pottery, glass, metal, bone (animal bone), brick and tile, mostly discarded and broken in ancient times, but LOTS of it. Probably a couple of tons of pottery each season.

3. No, no dead bodies. Our block is located just inside the Herculaneum gate. Firstly, this is the closest area of Pompeii to Vesuvius and the people that lived there were probably the first to run (complete speculation, but if you're a person living closest to a smoking volcano, you'd run too, wouldn't you). More importantly, when Pompeii was first excavated in the 1700s, this excavation began at the Herculaneum gate and moved south. Our block was the first to be uncovered. So any of the 79AD artifacts (including dead bodies) would have been removed then.

4. Yes, we really live in tents. I just got a new 5x7 foot tent. And yes, our campsite is called Camping Spartacus. More on campsite living when I get there and can post pictures.

5. I am not afraid of Vesuvius. Although it is still active. It erupted last sometime in the 40s, and is getting due for another one, I'm told, but I'm not worried at all. Mom might be a little worried, but she's more worried about my relative closer proximity to Iraq (this is a needless worry too, as far as I'm concerned, since I live in DC most of the year, which is certainly a better target than Pompeii).

6. Sometimes digging is tedious, but not as much as some people would expect. We get to use big tools sometimes (pickaxes and big shovels) and while care is necessary, we do not excavate with brushes. Brushes are overkill. We move a lot of dirt in the five weeks that we're there, so digging quickly but carefully is a must.

7. Yes, there is a modern Pompei. Ancient Pompeii is located in the middle of the Bay of Naples, a very populous area of Italy. The ruins are right in the middle of several towns, one of which is modern Pompei. It's a kinda grungy town that is better known in Italy for being home to the Cathedral of Pompei. Anyway, There's no getting away from tourists and roads and people and cities and civilization. I'm not out in the middle of nowhere. I live a quick walk away from a very large supermarket, down town modern Pompei, the south Italy highway, and all the other amenities of an Italian city (gelato!).

8. Ancient Pompeii has two I's as it is the Latin plural of Pompeius, the family the city was named after. Modern Pompei has one I cause it's Italian and the second I was dropped somewhere in the evolution of Latin to Italian.

9. We only dig in the summer for a couple of reasons. The dig is run by Professors and other academics, all of whom have to go home to their universities during the academic year to teach. Secondly, the vast majority of the fieldschool students (who do all the digging) are college kids and have the summer off. Thirdly, winters in Italy are rainy and mud is really hard to dig.

Ask me more questions if you have them!
- posted by Claire @ 6:49 PM 4 comments

 
The First Email: Another Year, More Dirt
hello, all
as per usual, i will be leaving for southern italy in a couple of days. as i'm sure most of you are aware, i've made a habit of digging with an archaeology group (the Anglo-American Project in Pompeii or AAPP) for the past three years, and this summer is no exception. i'll be weilding a trowel and directing about 12 students as an excavation supervisor, the same position i held last year. also, i usually send out emails about once a week, talking about what's going on in the dirt. this year will be a little different. several people have urged me to start a blog about the whole thing (mostly envisioning epic, indiana jones-esque adventures). so i've consented, but i think i'm going to do a little of both. i'll still send out the emails, but they'll also be posted on the blog, possibly along with pictures and more indepth yammer and certainly links. all that fun blog stuff.
so until august 14th, i'll be reachable by email with varying reliability as the little internet shack at camping spartacus is rife with mosquitos and is often busy (two computers serving 120+ people is quite a bit of competition), or by regular pen on paper, stamp on envelope mail to this address:

Claire Weiss
Gruppo Archaeologico Inglese-Americano,
Camping Spartacus
Via Plino, 127, 80045,
Pompei (NA)
Italia

send me mail! it's rather a lot like getting care packages at college, we live for real live mail. and i promise to reciprocate with a postcard.
ah, and the blog url:
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/~cweiss/claireinpompeii
this is a very all-inclusive email list, so if you havent heard from me in a while, hi! and let me now should you want to be removed from the list.
-claire

- posted by Claire @ 8:12 AM 0 comments

 
Joining the fold
Four years ago I was still a semi-declared Latin major at Swarthmore. One of the perks of being in Classics at Swat is sometime in the middle of first semester, the department sends out an email listing "cool things to do during the summer". Within the one that I received my sophomore year was a listing for the Anglo-American Project in Pompeii.

This was not, however, the first time I had heard of the Project. After Summer Break, Alyssa (my roomie) had come back to school toting a slip of paper with the name of the group written on it in blue marker. A friend of hers at Duke had a friend who had been on the project and it had changed her life. So now with two recommendations, I applied to the field school.

About the Project itself. Every year, approximately 70 students of varying age and experience are accepted as feildschool students. Varying age translates to people between the ages of 17 and 78. The vast majority of the "kids" are mid college students, in their twenties, but there are always a handful of late high school kids, thirtysomethings, and one or two 40 and aboves. Some of them have dug in other field schools or are archaeology majors in college or gradschool, but most have never dug in the dirt, held a trowel, or even been to Italy. This is the beauty of the Project (and a system that I am a product of). Everyone comes in with some or no knowledge of how to go about doing research in the dirt and we teach them everything they need to know. How to hold a trowel, how to tell the difference between soil types, how to identify SU changes, how to read a wall, how to catalog finds and store them safely, how to work in a group and communicate all these things effectively. This is how I started with the Project.

All of the "kids" are divided among 7 or so supervisors and these smaller groups are assigned to Archaeological Areas (AAs), areas which have been set forth to be excavated during that field season. The supervisor does all of the teaching and leading of excavation and keeping of records and grading of students, the students do all the digging (or most of it). My supervisor was Amy Walters, a statuesque Bradford graduate student of Archaeology. And we had fun. We learned some serious Archaeology and I find myself now trying to think of how Amy would go about excavating things, how did Amy teach us this when we learned it, how did Amy grade my journal? She was great to have as a first teacher of Archaeology. Very confident in the dirt, very clear in her explanations of things, and very goofy. Of our group of ten in our AA, three of us came back as second year students. High marks for Amy for teaching us well and for instilling that love for the dirt that made us want to come back.

The Project is set up to allow students to climb the ladder of responsibility within the Project. First year students can reapply for a second year student (or advanced students) position. Of the 70 or so first years, about 20 come back as second years. My second year there were 11 of us. Second years are still students in all respects, but have done it once, so a good deal of teaching the new crop how to do things often falls to the advanced students by means of setting an example and showing by doing.

The third year of participation is by invitation. A very few are invited back to be Assistant Supervisors, are assigned a small AA (archaeologica area), get one or two students (who rotate out of a full sized AA), and are left to direct their own excavation with oversight by a full fledged supervisor. It's a wonderful learning experience with a good degree of freedom, but with the comfort of knowing that someone else is there to lend an opinion or help with interpretation and teaching. I skipped this step.

My third year (last year), one of the people slated to be a supervisor had had his gallbladder removed and was not in the best of positions to live in a tent all summer and dig in the dirt. So two weeks before I showed up in Southern Italy, Rick Jones, project director, emailed me asking if I would like to be a supervisor? After maybe 2 minutes consideration, I accepted, not entirely sure of my comfort level with the whole thing but certainly willing to try. And it went beautifully, or atleast very well due to Circumstances Beyond My Control in the dirt. And this summer I'm going back as a Supervisor again, hopefully to one of the same trenches I had last year. For stories of the woes of last year, read email I sent out last year. They're fun.
- posted by Claire @ 5:56 PM 0 comments

 
The Inception
i have up a single word: "testing..." for five minutes and i already get one comment. hmm, wonder if maybe i should change the title. "half naked" may well pull in people i hadnt figured on. the title comes from Russell, friend of mine from DC who, upon seeing a picture of me in my excavation getup (the picture of me in my profile) said, "Awwww, look at you all half naked and down in a big hole." appropriate for how i spend most of my summers these days.
- posted by Claire @ 10:20 PM 3 comments