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Beneath the volcanic ash of Pompeii, researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Design are unearthing the hidden lives of ancient Romans at the Casa Della Regina Carolina – a once luxurious home buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
Their project — co-sponsored by the GSD, the University of Bologna, and Cornell University — is focused on applying a myriad of scientific techniques to the remains of the house and its expansive garden to reconstruct how the citizens of Pompeii lived and shaped their ecosystem.
To explore the site, the researchers drafted a multidisciplinary team of scientists from the fields of botany, architecture, and remote sensing. Lee Graña, an assistant field director from the University of Bologna, brought a unique focus on ichthyology — the study of fish and their remains — to better understand the diet of the home’s elite residents.
“We have to consider all the potential avenues of investigation,” Graña said. “I come in with ichthyology as well looking at fish bones. We have a zoo archeologist who's looking at all the animal remains. We have specialists who are doing micromorphology with the soil.”
Kaja Tally-Schumacher, an assistant professor at the GSD and co-director of the project, brought a specific focus on the lives of the non-elite landscape designers and gardeners who worked in the house. Tally-Schumacher said her work is driven by a desire to combat the traditional scholarly emphasis on elite Roman life.
“We really wanted to address that in this particular house; think about who were the gardeners, designers of the garden, who were the enslaved workers that would have made possible the life and activities in the rooms of the house,” Tally-Schumacher said. “We are very interested in the social and religious dynamics of the ancient inhabitants and users of the house.”
Tally-Schumacher and her colleagues began excavations in 2018, and have returned almost every summer since. But the researchers’ work has been halted in recent years by the growing effects of climate change.
“We’ve really been forced to reckon with climate change today because of the extreme heat that my team and I experience when we’re out in the field, working for 12 hours a day, as well as flash flooding that occurs on site,” Tally-Schumacher said.
“The past is literally vanishing in the soil, so that future archeologists potentially might not be able to recover these historic landscapes,” she added.
A major focus of the project has been the plants of the gardens. The researchers looked to pollen preserved and embedded in the fresco wall paintings of the house, to understand the ecology of both the gardens and the surrounding landscape.
“We've been able to reconstruct an ecological snapshot of the types of plants that grew in this really, really large urban garden, but also a regional snapshot, because tree pollen can travel hundreds of kilometers,” Tally-Shumacher said.
The team’s biggest discoveries have come from the soil and the root cavities left behind after the eruption. These findings identify which plants were cultivated and consumed — and revealed the sophisticated gardening practices of Roman gardeners.
“The Romans clearly understood that this soil, which they were quarrying from somewhere else in the city or outside of the city, was helping the growth of their plants,” Graña said.
“We would use a fertilizer if we're planting the tree. We want it to grow very well,” Graña explained. “But these Romans knew that this soil was special.”
Graña also found fish bones from dozens of species, suggesting that ancient Romans relied heavily on seafood — both for consumption and as compost.
“If you go to investigate this garden, you have two dozen, three dozen species, some of them quite large, deep, deep water species,” he said. “So these Romans are buying everything available in the market, and they're showing off their money.”
In future summer visits, the team plans to shift focus from the garden to the house itself. Caitlín Barrett ’03, a Cornell professor and co-director of the project, said upcoming excavations will examine domestic features such as bathrooms and latrines.
“What we'd like to do is, for the next couple of seasons, learn more about the house, in addition to the garden and the history of that house and excavating latrines,” Barrett said.
“I never have been so excited about the prospect of other people's poop, but you really can get a lot of information about diet and health and lifestyle and excavating the earlier phases of the house,” she added.
—Staff writer Ramon Moreno can be reached at ramon.moreno@thecrimson.com.
—Staff writer Yahir Ramirez can be reached at yahir.ramirez@thecrimson.com.
