As you can see from the title of today's lecture,

"Habitats at Herculaneum and Early Roman Interior

Decoration," we're going to be concentrating

once again, at least in the first half of

the lecture, on domestic architecture in

Campania.

We're going to look at several houses in Herculaneum,

and then we're going to move from there to begin our

discussion of early Roman interior decoration,

namely the First and Second Styles of Roman wall painting.

And what you'll see makes them particularly relevant to what

we've been discussing thus far this term is the fact that in

both the First and Second Styles,

architecture is depicted in these paintings,

and we're going to see some very interesting relationships

between that and the built monuments that we've talked

about thus far this semester.

Just to remind you of the location of Herculaneum,

which is usually called the sister city of Pompeii,

because of that locale.

We see it on the map here.

Pompeii is down in this location.

Herculaneum is to the northeast of Pompeii, closer to Naples

than Pompeii is, as you can see.

And note also the city of Boscoreale,

Boscoreale, which is located between,

almost equidistant -- a little bit closer to Pompeii than

Herculaneum -- but in between the two.

And I point it out to you now because we're going to look at

an important room, with paintings,

from the city of Boscoreale today as well.

Here you see a view, a Google Earth flyover,

of Herculaneum, as it looks today.

It's very helpful because you can see a couple of things here

that I want you to keep in mind, as we look at this city.

One, that although most of the city of Pompeii has been

excavated, only about a quarter or

twenty-five percent of the city of Herculaneum has been

excavated.

So we have much less at Herculaneum than we do for

Pompeii, and what we're missing, for the most part,

is the public architecture.

We don't have a great amphitheater from Herculaneum.

We don't have a theater and a music hall complex.

We think we might have part of the basilica,

but we're not absolutely sure.

We don't have the great large forum space that we have in

Pompeii.

So we're missing a lot of that public architecture at

Herculaneum, which gives us less of a sense

of what the city was originally like,

at least in its public face, although there's no doubt that

that material still lies beneath the ground.

So we have only a quarter of the city, mostly the residential

part of the city, or part of the residential part

of the city.

But there are several houses there that are extremely--

give us, provide information, especially about what was going

on between the earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius,

62 to 79, that are extremely valuable in terms of giving us a

sense again of the evolution of Roman domestic architecture.

The other issue that this particular view raises is the

reason why Herculaneum is less well excavated than Pompeii,

and the reason for that has to do--and you can see it well

here-- has to do with the fact that

the modern city grew up on top of the ancient city.

And they were able at one point to clear part of it,

for excavation, but they have not been able to

clear the rest.

It's a political nightmare to have to deal--

you have to relocate all the people who live in this area and

have lived in this area for a very long time.

That's politically a very difficult thing to do.

It also is extremely costly.

So thus far only twenty-five percent of Herculaneum revealed.

Let's all hope that at some point someday Italy can sort

this out and find a way to excavate the rest of this

extraordinary city.

You can see from this view that I took as--this is one of the

views that you get as you enter the site, the current location

today.

But I think you can see very well here again what I'm talking

about: the relationship between the ancient city,

lower ground level, that has been unearthed through

excavation.

You can see a peristyle court of one of the houses here,

for example.

But you can see the way in which the modern city rings the

site, and again what a challenge it

would be to remove that modern city and to reveal the rest of

Herculaneum.

Here's another view where you can also see some of the remains

of the ancient city, of these residences and so on,

and their relationship to the rest of the town.

With regard to the history of Herculaneum, it is very similar

to the history of Pompeii.

One difference is that the city of Herculaneum was supposedly

founded by Hercules, hence its name Herculaneum.

But in other respects the history again is quite

comparable.

We know, for example, that the city of Herculaneum

was overseen for awhile by that same Italic tribe called the

Oscans, who were then conquered by the

Samnites, and the Samnites took over

Herculaneum.

And it was during the Samnite period in Herculaneum that we

begin to see the same kind of architectural development that

we saw also in Pompeii.

We also know that those in Herculaneum,

the citizens of Herculaneum, the leaders of Herculaneum,

got involved in the Social Wars, as did those in Pompeii,

and that the city of Herculaneum was conquered by

Rome in 89 B.C., in 89 B.C.

So Herculaneum becomes a Roman colony in 89 B.C.

Thereafter we know--and of course at that point,

just as in Pompeii, the Romans begin to build

buildings in the Roman manner.

From that point on we know again comparable development.

We know that at Herculaneum they also witnessed that very

serious earthquake, an earthquake that also

destroyed significant parts of the city of Herculaneum,

and they too went through that frenzied seventeen-year period

of rebuilding.

But again, just as at Pompeii, it was for naught,

because the city of Herculaneum was also covered by the ash and

lava of Vesuvius.

However, there's one major difference that has to do with

the way that ash and lava fell.

We talked about the fact that at Pompeii there was actually

quite a bit of notice, that the ash and lava came down

on the city fairly gradually, and that there was time for

people to escape, and that most of them did,

except for those foolhardy souls who decided to wait it

out, which we discussed a couple of

lectures ago.

But in Herculaneum, it happened much more rapidly,

and in fact it became very clear, very quickly,

that a huge blanket of lava was headed toward the city.

And needless to say, that encouraged people to leave

pronto, and we thought,

at least for a very long time, that that's in fact what had

happened, that everybody had escaped the

onslaught of Vesuvius.

What happened after that blanket of lava engulfed the

city is it hermetically sealed the city,

hermetically sealed the city, in such a way that materials

that have been lost at Pompeii were preserved at Herculaneum.

And the best example of that is wood.

We have almost no wood.

Wood is not a material that withstands the test of time

terribly well, and we have almost no wood from

Pompeii.

But from the city of Herculaneum, we have a

considerable amount of wood, and this just has to do with

the fact again that the city was so hermetically sealed by that

blanket of lava.

And I can show you a few examples of what survives in

wood.

For example, this bed, or part of a bed,

that's still preserved, as you can see here,

with the wooden legs.

A wooden partition in one of the houses, to divide one

section, kind of like a modern pogo wall, to divide one section

of the structure from another.

You can see also the wooden frames around the doors and

around the windows are also preserved,

as are these wooden beams that you can see over the doorways

and over the windows-- mostly over the doorways--those

wooden beams also made out of wood.

And this is the most famous example,

and one that everybody sees as you wander the streets of

Herculaneum, the Casa a Graticcio,

which we see here -- and you can see that even the

balcony, which is made out of wood,

is extremely well preserved.

So this provides evidence that we don't have from Pompeii

that's extremely valuable in terms of understanding Roman

building practice.

I mentioned already though that we didn't think anyone--

we thought that all those who lived in Herculaneum had escaped

from Vesuvius, but it turns out that was not

in fact the case.

As recently as the 1980s, some archaeologists were doing

some excavating down at the sea wall of the city of Herculaneum,

and lo and behold, they came upon a cache of

skeletons.

And I show you some of those skeletons here.

And those skeletons are in the same kinds of positions as the

bodies that we saw at Pompeii, in that clearly a number of

them have huddled together for protection,

futile protection as it turned out.

And here another one who's raising himself or herself in an

attempt to survive somehow this awful event that has occurred.

We find these skeletons--and they found these skeletons near

the sea wall, and what they've concluded from

this, two things: one,

again the difference in the lava that fell on Herculaneum.

You can see that it not only preserved wood,

it also preserved bone, which is why the skeletons are

still visible here, whereas at Pompeii everything

decomposed, at Pompeii.

So the situation again quite different.

But they've also been able to determine that what clearly

happened here is again because there was so much notice,

people fled.

And where did they flee?

They fled toward the water, because they were right on the

sea, they had a lot of boats,

and the hope was that they could ferry everybody out from

the city.

And for the most part they were successful,

but there was a certain group that unfortunately got left

behind, and it was their remains that

were discovered in the 1980s.

It's amazing what these bodies can tell us about some of the

people who lived there, and I'll just give you a little

sense of a couple of the storylines.

Here is the skeleton of a woman, and you can see that this

woman has-- if you look very closely at her

left hand, two of her fingers--you can see

she has rings on two of her fingers,

and those are larger views of those very rings.

Two rings with green and red stones.

The red stone, you can see,

has a little bird depicted on it.

These were her rings.

Consequently the archaeologists call her "the ring

lady"; or it should be "the rings

lady."

But here she is with her two rings.

And you can see that she also had, next to her side,

these two absolutely gorgeous golden snake bracelets,

sort of à la Cleopatra, Cleopatraesque,

that she obviously loved and took with her when she attempted

to escape from the city.

And an even more poignant story is this one.

What we're looking at here is the head of a woman;