Unearthing Insula 10
The biggest dig at Pompeii in a generation is working to expose nearly an entire block of the ancient city. Archaeologists are making astonishing discoveries that shed powerful new light on life and death in the shadow of Vesuvius, as Giuseppe Scarpati and Sophie Hay told Matthew Symonds.
The building was awaiting a transformation. It stood in what is now known as Insula 10, Region 9, of Pompeii, and enjoyed an enviable position on the via di Nola: an important thoroughfare leading from one of the city gates towards the forum baths. Like many houses in Pompeii, a narrow corridor funnelled visitors from the street into a central atrium that was open to the sky and lined with rooms. Some of these were decorated with sumptuous frescoes; others had been given over to a commercial bakery. Under normal circumstances, passers on the street would find the aroma of fresh bread competing with the more earthy odours emanating from a neighbouring laundry. But these were not normal circumstances. The donkey driven mills for grinding corn lay still, and the great oven was cold, because major building works were in full swing at the property. Roof tiles, bricks, and stone were stacked in the atrium, while amphorae brimmed with quick lime, slaked lime, and lime mixed with soil to make different kinds of mortar. In a side room of the bakery, hoes and a pickaxe were carefully stored for the work ahead. But it was not to be. Instead, the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 brought change of a very different kind, transforming the building into a tomb.
Inside Region 9
All of the information about this combined bakery and residential building in the city block known as Insula 10 has been freshly won from the volcanic debris that still smothers unexcavated portions of Pompeii. The digging is granting remarkable insights into Roman life – not least a uniquely detailed glimpse of a building team at work – and has come about thanks to major conservation efforts that are under way at the site. ‘Insula 10 lies between two other insulae that were exposed in the 18th and 19th century’, says Sophie Hay, a research fellow at the University of London and member of the Pompeii media team. ‘It’s the only street frontage that was still buried on the via di Nola in Region 9. So it lies at the boundary between excavated and unexcavated parts of the city. But because the neighbouring insulae have all been exposed, Insula 10 juts out like a tongue of land. This presents a challenge when it comes to stabilising the edge of the excavated area, which needs to be carefully maintained because there is a risk of collapse when it rains heavily. Obviously, it is much easier to maintain a single straight face, rather than three sides of a rectangle. So the idea, if you like, is to lop off this tongue of land. The excavation has been born from that need.’
One of the challenges for the archaeologists investigating Insula 10 is reaching Roman ground level, because they have to dig through the many metres of volcanic material that buried the city. In the northernmost of the three rooms that made up the commercial bakery, they found traces of a tragic scene that must have played out soon after this pumice first began to rain down on Pompeii. ‘We found the bodies of two women – one younger, one older – and a four- to seven-year-old boy in the room’, says Giuseppe Scarpati, archaeologist of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. ‘We know that they died very soon after the eruption started, as their skeletons lay right on the room floor. This is a different position to many of the dead at Pompeii, who are often found higher up in the sequence of volcanic material that fell on the site, after surviving the opening phase of the eruption. These three seem to have been crushed when a wall and the ceiling of the room collapsed in on them.’
The bodies of this ill-fated party were the only ones found in the building. While it seems likely that they can be counted among the very first of Vesuvius’ victims at Pompeii, what they were doing in the building is less apparent. The bakery was closed for the renovation work, so it is unclear why three of the presumably enslaved people working there would have stayed on, after the rest of the team and even the donkeys powering the mills had been moved elsewhere. Perhaps the deceased were living in the residential part of the house and seeking shelter further away from the open-roof of the atrium. Alternatively, they may have been passers on the road who had no connection to the property, and simply ducked into the deserted building site in a bid to find refuge. If so, their path would not have been a straightforward one, as the only way in and out of the suite of rooms forming the bakery was via a single doorway that opened off from the building atrium. This arrangement speaks volumes about the conditions that the workforce would have been subjected to.
A high-security bakery
‘There was no commercial frontage to the bakery where they could sell their goods directly on to the street’, says Sophie. ‘Instead, access and movement was really restricted, which is why we have described it as a “prison bakery”. Once that single doorway connecting to the building atrium was closed and locked, everyone inside the bakery was trapped with the animals and the mills. A little window was found in the room of the bakery where we think the enslaved people lived. It was an internal window facing into the rest of the property, so anyone who managed to crawl through it would just have found themselves in the residential part – it didn’t take them outside the building. Even so, that window still had bars on it, which shows that the owner was taking steps to keep people in. We know from ancient authors like Apuleius that toiling in a bakery was really hard work: they would often put criminals in them, because it was one of the worst jobs going. There were the animals, the constant milling, the heat of the oven – it was a hard life. Today, we generally think of bakeries as nice places with fresh bread, but Roman bakeries don’t have a good press.’
While the elaborate security arrangements leave little room for doubt about the owner’s views on the bakery workforce, there is a hint of some pride in the produce they laboured to bake. A still-life fresco on the atrium wall just beyond the doorway to the bakery caused international excitement when it was found, because it bears an uncanny resemblance to a modern bread-based delicacy: the pizza. No other image of such a dish is known from Pompeii. It is shown – alongside other food – on a silver platter, beside a goblet charged with wine. The topping seems to include dates, nuts, and some sort of pesto-mix sauce – instead of tomatoes and mozzarella – while the size of the serving marks another departure from a typical modern pizza. Using the wine goblet as a scale shows that the dish is closer in size to an appetiser, rather than a meal in its own right. Perhaps, then, Pompeii was not home to a true proto-pizza, but the dish still looks like a tasty addition to knowledge of Roman cuisine, even if the production methods are less than palatable for a modern audience.
This is an extract of an article that appeared in CWA 126. Read on in the magazine (Click here to subscribe) or on our website, The Past, which offers all of the magazine’s content digitally. At The Past you will be able to read each article in full as well as the content of our other magazines, Current Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and Military History Matters.
