Forgotten, but not entirely lost
The title of this article uses a familiar phrase, but Pompeii was never wholly forgotten in the way the word suggests. After the eruption of 79 CE the surface of the site was covered with a thick layer of volcanic material, and the town was not rebuilt. Survivors and later visitors salvaged what they could by digging down into the ruins, and the exact location slipped out of general memory over the following centuries. But the area remained inhabited and farmed, and local people continued to find traces. What was lost was a clear public knowledge that a particular Roman town lay under the fields, not the existence of the ruins altogether.
The place was known locally as “La Civita”, the city, a name that suggests some folk memory of buried remains. In 1592 an architect named Domenico Fontana cut a channel to carry water through the area, and the work passed through ancient structures. Inscriptions and walls were hit, but nobody carried out any proper investigation, and the discoveries had little immediate effect.
Herculaneum first, then Pompeii
Systematic digging began not at Pompeii but at Herculaneum. In the early 1700s workers sinking a well found marble and statues, and from 1738 the Bourbon king of Naples, Charles, supported excavations there. Because Herculaneum lay under very deep, hardened material, the work was done largely by tunnelling. Pompeii followed in 1748, when work began under the direction of a Spanish military engineer, Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre, in the service of the same king.
For some years it was not certain which ancient town this was. The identification of the site as Pompeii became firm in 1763, when an inscription naming the town and its public body was found. The Greek and Roman writers who had mentioned Pompeii, including the letters of Pliny the Younger describing the eruption, now had an archaeological counterpart.
Digging under the Bourbons
Early excavation resembled treasure hunting more than archaeology. The objectives were to find statues, paintings and valuable objects for the royal collection. Teams followed walls, cut out wall paintings, took them away and often left the rest. Records were sparse. Artefacts went to the royal museum at Portici and later to Naples, and they were treated as the king’s property. Visitors were controlled, and Europeans of the Grand Tour period came to see the finds, which fed a wave of neoclassical taste in art and design across the continent.
Critics at the time already saw the problems. The scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who visited the area and wrote about the finds, criticised the secrecy and the poor recording. Those complaints helped establish the idea that excavated material had value as evidence, not just as art.
The first major shift in the nineteenth century came during the period of French rule in southern Italy, when excavation was expanded and larger areas were exposed. The pace then varied with politics and funds.
Fiorelli and a new approach
After the unification of Italy, Giuseppe Fiorelli took charge of the site in 1863. He introduced a more orderly system: dividing the city into regions and blocks, numbering buildings, and recording finds by location. He also began leaving objects and decoration in place where possible, instead of moving them all to a museum. His tool for studying the dead, which filled voids in the ash with plaster, is covered in the article on plaster body casts. Later directors, notably Amedeo Maiuri in the twentieth century, uncovered large parts of the town and also dug below the level of 79 CE to understand earlier phases.
Ownership of finds and protection of the site
Ownership changed as the political setting changed. Under the Bourbons, discoveries belonged to the crown. After unification they passed to the Italian state, and modern Italian heritage law treats archaeological material as state property. Export of antiquities from Italy is tightly controlled, and Pompeii objects held in museums abroad generally left through earlier channels such as gifts or sales in the period of royal control. Questions about the return of items sometimes arise, as they do for many collections, and they are debated case by case.
Preservation has been a persistent challenge. Once exposed, buildings are subject to weather, plant growth, tourists and sometimes reburial being needed. Allied bombing in 1943 damaged parts of the site, and the collapse of a structure known as the House of the Gladiators in 2010 drew attention to neglect. The Great Pompeii Project, a conservation and restoration programme supported by European funds from about 2012, was launched in response. Its results are generally regarded as positive but ongoing, and judgements about success vary.
Method today
Modern work at Pompeii differs sharply from the Bourbon digging, and it follows the same archaeological methods used at sites elsewhere. Archaeologists use stratigraphic excavation, recording each layer in the order of deposition, a method related to the thinking behind tell stratigraphy. They also use remote techniques such as LiDAR survey and geophysical mapping in some areas to plan work without digging. Many questions now concern not new palaces and statues but the dating of buildings, the character of ordinary housing, and the town’s earlier history. Interest also lies in leaving parts of the site unexcavated so that future generations with better methods can study them.
Taken together, the story shows an unusual feature of Pompeii. The site was a place of loss in 79 CE, a place of plunder in the eighteenth century and, since the nineteenth, an increasingly careful archaeological resource whose meaning has been shaped by who owned it and why they dug.