Good morning. 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, 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 that 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. Is 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 25% of the city of Herculaneum has been excavated. So we have much less than, 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 don't have, 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 are missing a lot of that public architecture at Herculaneum, which gives us less of the sense of what the city was originally like at least in its public face. Although there is no doubt that, that material still lies beneath the ground. So we have only s 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 eruption of, 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, 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, you know, 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 25% of Herculenium 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, 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 sight. And again, what a challenge it would be to, to remove that modern city and 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, is quite comparable. We know, for example, that the city of Herculaneum was overseen for a while by that same Italic tribe called the Oscans, who were then, 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, 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 the Hurc, that in Herculaneum they also witnessed that very serious earthquake. An earthquake that, that also destroyed significant parts of the city of Herculaneum, and they too went through that frenzied 17 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, 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 most, the best example of that is wood. We have almost no wood. Wood is not a material that, that stands the test of time terribly well, [COUGH] 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 this, 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, 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, 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 Pomp, 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 archeologists were doing some excavating down at the sea walls 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 that the body, as the bodies that we saw at Pompeii. In that clearly a number of them have hurdled together for protection, futile protection as it turned out and here another one who is raising himself or herself in an attempt, to, to survive somehow, this awful event that has ocurred. 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, 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 hopes 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, of the story lines. Here is a the, the, 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. Consequentially the archaeologist called 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 snake, golden snake bracelets, sort of ala Cleopatra. Cleopatra asked, 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, a young woman, the, the excavators have determined. And if you can, if you look at the top of her head, you will see that a tuft of hair is actually preserved. It looks dark in this image but it's actually blond, so they were able to determine this was a young blonde woman who lived in Herculaneum. And, you can see the small size of the skeleton below. This is not hers, it's obviously her, the fetus, the baby. She was seven months pregnant, they've been able to determine. And, so they have found the bones of the baby as well, and you can see them here. In excavators, the excavation reports, they talk about the fact that the bones of the baby of the infant of the unborn child are so fragile that it was like picking up eggshells when they were trying to, to piece this skeleton together. So it's incredible, the kind of information that archaeologists have been able to glean from those trying to escape Herculaneum on that fateful day in August of 79. One other sad story is just that they did actually find the remains of one child. This is sort of like the story of the dog at Pompei. One child, who's remains were left in this little crib in one house. And again, the bones are preserved because of this, the circumstance of the particular configuration of the Law, but the bones of that, of that small child are also preserved in this crib in one of the houses in Herculaneum.
