It is well known that archaeologists when confronted by a site that was occupied and reoccupied over centuries have often homed in on the periods in which they are most interested. I don’t blame them (so would I), but there are all kinds of consequences for what we then don’t see.
The classic example of this is the Acropolis in Athens. When it was excavated in the nineteenth century, the whole aim was to clear the Ottoman buildings from the hill and to expose the remains of the “glory days” of Athens in the fifth century BCE. That meant also removing the remains of the medieval and Roman period, in the hunt for the fifth century. That explains why the Acropolis now looks like it does, a bit of a “fifth-century theme park” (you will search in vain for the remains of the mosque, and most of the Roman structures). And it also explains why the surface of the hill is that treacherous shiny bare rock. Around the fifth-century monuments, the early excavators dug right down to the bedrock on which we must now walk (if we leave the safety of the modern walkways). The Greeks and Romans more likely pranced around on a good covering of turf (vel sim).
It was the same, I recall, at the Roman town of Wroxeter (Viriconium) in Shropshire where I dug fifty years ago. Most of the early explorations had been searching for all the impressive masonry structures, of the baths and the forum etc. It wasn’t until the 1970s that anyone thought to look for the faint traces of the wooden structures, which were the remains of the late Roman/post Roman town that might have continued there, after the grand masonry structures had been abandoned. I was a very junior part of the team that began to reveal those traces and, in some ways, rewrote the history of Wroxeter (though I have to admit that the significance and dating of what we found is still disputed – hence my “might have continued”).
Inevitably it was also the same at Pompeii. For decades, if not centuries, it was “Pompeii AD 79” that captivated everyone. The desire was to reveal the city as it appeared immediately before the destruction. The first phase of seeing beyond that was to wonder what the earlier history and appearance of the town was like, and by the end of the twentieth century excavations started to dig down systematically and carefully through (and under) the surviving structures to get a peek at what was there before. Now they are looking (Wroxeter-style) at the other end of the time spectrum, to ask what happened after the eruption.
The important point here is that the deposit that covered the different places around Vesuvius varied in character. Herculaneum was overwhelmed by a deep impenetrable layer of volcanic residue, which completely hid the place and was very hard to tunnel through. Pompeii by contrast was covered by much looser material which was relatively easy to penetrate after the disaster to rescue possession or loot what was left (although it was hugely dangerous because of the risk that it would all fall in on top of you). It was also far less deep than the covering at Herculaneum, and the tops of buildings were still visible above it.
Sure enough, what has now been revealed are all kinds of later structures (ovens and the like) that were part of the settlement on the site long after the eruption. I don’t think it possibly adds up to a “new town” of Pompeii. It’s more a long running squatter settlement, which seems to have colonised some of the earlier buildings that were still accessible). But it shows another phase of life at Pompeii, nonetheless. You can download a full description in Italian here or read a brief English news item here.
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