 Our own Arphean Tedpena, J. Sidorpena. Yeah, that's me, right? This is what he's called, he's like Tedin. Yeah, I keep paying on right now. Anyway, so he, as you are aware, is not only a member of ARC, but he's just in a plastic department and actually works in various places in Rome and Italy. But right now, he's working in Pompeii, which is pretty neat. So in that work, he's going to say something about part of his work there, which is quite wonderful on household archaeology, really, which many people who don't get the chance to work in Pompeii might be working on in other places of the world. So we get to hear from Professor Pena about the Pompeii Artifact Life History Project that he sees project there, characterizing and comparing three residential artifact assemblies. So this is a wonderful, up-close household archaeological example, really excited about it. So thank you very much. Thanks, Christine. Hi, yeah, I'm going to speak about one of the projects that I'm involved in, as Christine was saying, at Pompeii, which has been staffed primarily by UC Berkeley graduate students, at least one of whom is out here today. And I'll tell you about what I've been up to in recent years. I'll start with some background that I've been interested in issues of artifact life history for over a decade now. I published a book in 2007, which was kind of a detailed effort to sort of investigate what we can say about, particularly, the life history of ceramics in the Roman world, which kind of got me started on my work at Pompeii, because when I reflected on these kinds of issues, I realized that Pompeii is a place, really one of the few places we can get at many of them. What I'm showing you here is kind of a tarted up, ugly, shaffarian model of, but most of you maybe recognize as much simpler diagram, but this will confuse you, thinking about the different ways in which pottery flows through, to be again, a vulgar processualist, the systemic context in the Roman world, so the kind of thing that I've been thinking about. And flowing from this, I decided to initiate a research project at Pompeii called the Pompeii Artifact Life History Project, or PALHIP, which is kind of nifty, although it does sound like something you might want to have surgically removed. And so that's what I want to talk about today. And the basic idea is that because I'm kind of old and lazy, I don't want to do what is the archaeological equivalent of what this guy is doing when you want to catch fish. You figure out where the fish of the sort you want are biting, and when they're biting, and you get the right kind of bait, and you go down, and you throw your line in, and kind of the rest is up to the gods, which is even with things like geophysical prospection, fundamentally, what much of archaeology remains. I'm going to be more like this guy, right, who goes into the fish market, and he knows what he wants. And sure, maybe he's not sure when exactly it was caught, and who caught it, and how long ago, and this kind of thing. But you walk right up to the counter, and you say, I want one of those. So what I'm doing at Pompeii is kind of the archaeological equivalent of that, in the sense that rather than conducting any kind of new excavations, which are costly and difficult to get the permits for, and to organize, and take decades, and this sort of thing, the idea is that since there's an excavation going on at Pompeii for literally centuries, generally of bad quality, but often recovering sets of artifacts in contexts that are particularly informative with respect to issues of artifact life history. So the idea is to cut to the chase, to identify some of those sets of materials already in captivity, and go there with a small group, not more people that can fit in a car, because that's how we get around, and carry out these detailed characterizations of these sets of materials with a view of elucidating aspects of artifact life history. So here's a background satellite image of the Bay of Naples. You can see Vesuvius, that giant pimple up there on the upper left. And so the idea is then, is we want to document life history of portable material culture at Pompeii with a view to elucidating particularly practices of household consumption. Well, consumption, I'm trying to not use the word household for reasons I might get to a bit later today. And we want to learn then about manufacturer acquisition, use storage, maintenance, repair, modification, reuse, recycling, and discard of these items. And the idea then is we identify these selected sets of materials that were already excavated in the past, principally ceramic glass, metal, and stones, so non-perishables, thinking about what was our topic of last week, which was about perishables, that have been excavated by projects in the past. We now zoom in on the site of Pompeii itself, about 2 thirds excavated. The area inside the walls is maybe about 65 hectares. Again, we can look a little bit at what we've done. We carried out a first phase, a five-year research cycle from 2012 to 2016, which involved characterizing sets of materials from a variety of different places in Pompeii or outside the walls of the town and its general environs. And each of these we represented as a distinct sub-project within the larger pal-hip project. And I will talk about one of those sub-projects for comparative purposes a bit later today. But in general, I'll skip over that. What I want to focus on is phase two, a second five-year research cycle, which we started in 2018 and continued last year. And in this project, what we're doing is rather than jumping around, we're focusing on the characterization of the assemblages from a set of residences all in one block within Pompeii. Using the Pompeii designation, it's in Regio I, the cities divided up by archaeologists into these distinct regions on the basis of the major elements of the road system. And then with each of these Regiones, each block or insula in Latin is assigned a distinct number. So we're in Regio I, insula 11, is the set of properties that interest us. So what I want to do then is give you some background on this work, and then we'll look at some of our results and some of the ways that I'm beginning to get off my can and start analyzing them. And indeed, if you have any suggestions about ways that might be fruitful to do this, I would be very happy to have your input. So if we look at this plan of the town of Pompeii, I've blocked in for you there in red, Regio I, insula 11, very closely to the center of the town, but more in that eastern point of the football Pompeii shape a little bit like a football, right? And I'm showing you other places where the subprojects that we carried out in the first phase of operations were carried out. So that's where we are. What you see here now is a plan of the various properties in the block on the right and a satellite image of the block as you would see it today. Some of the gardens have been replanted, some of the structures re-roofed, so on and so forth. A little bit of background on this insula and getting to why I chose it. It was excavated by the Somnitendenza, the Italian antiquity service that they would be called the Parque Archeologi di Pompeii, over various campaigns in the past. In 1912 to 13, the director of excavations, Vittorio Spinazzola, who was determined to follow the main east-west street in Pompeii, that'd be the La Bondanza, excavated the facade of this block in 1912-13. And then, late in his reign as kind of the excavation director at Pompeii, which lasted well over 40 years, and indeed bracketed both the Fascist period and the First Italian Republic miraculously, Amadeo Majori excavated the rest of the insula from 1952 to 1964. Since then, there have been various short studies that looked at specific structures, principally their architecture and things of that sort. So that's what we had to draw on. Again, a plan of the insula on the right and what you have here on the left. And it's not clear to me how well you can see this, but this is a synopsis of the different properties on the block. Each region has a unique number. Each block or insula has a unique number. And then each doorway around the block is also numbered. So each doorway has a unique address. So we refer to properties by a number, which is the regio in Roman numerals, the insula. And then the one or two doorways or one or multiple doorways that a house might have. And so these are the various properties in each row, their characterization of what we understand them to have been functionally, the names that have been given to those by archaeologists in cases where they've been important enough to receive a name, two different measures of their ground floor area. And in the last column, their quartile. And this is based on an approach to analyzing properties that Pompeii developed by British scholar Andrew Wallace Hadrell, who ordered them in the size of their ground floor area and divided this up into quartiles so that he could begin to sort of look for structure in the data. And the point that leaps out here is that these are all relatively modest properties, even though you're seeing a lot of third and fourth quartiles. The fourth quartile ones are very small quartile ones. And so one of the things that we wanted to do was to look at assemblages from residential groups. I'm using that rather than households to avoid any kind of, maybe shall I say, interpretation that saying household involves. From what we can infer is the middle or lower end of some sort of socioeconomic hierarchy in the town. And this is because scholars have in the past not surprisingly been engaged by the large impressive properties at Pompeii. And so we know quite a bit about those, but there's been very little work done on people in properties that are less imposing than that. And so the idea of this block is that it's taken up primarily by these middle to low size residences, also the very little in the way of workshops and gardens and things like that, which tend to be pretty common out here in the eastern part of the town. And so this block interested me for that reason. But it also interested me because I've gotten a little tired of competing for turf in Pompeii. There are scholars from like in 25 different countries working there. And so I wanted to find a block that also flies totally under the radar that nobody would be the least bit interested in, so I could kind of have carte blanche there. And so this block was one that is very unfamous. In fact, it's only famous for one thing. It has this particular house here in its northeast corner, which is known as the Casa de la Venere in Bikini, the house of the Venus in the Bikini. And it's called that because when they were excavating it, just at the time that the Bikini craze was exploding in the early 1950s was like a really big deal. But they discovered in that property the statue of the goddess Venus wearing this kind of gilt bikini-like garb. And so naturally they played this up and it's very famous. And the only thing anyone ever knows about this block pretty much is this is the block where there's the Casa de la Venere in Bikini, which is kind of important for another more important reason, though. And that is that in the mid to late 1980s, just as scholars were beginning to try to work out approaches to studying artifact assemblages at Pompeii, it was a subject of a PhD dissertation by an Australian woman named Melinda Armit. And here you see its title page. It's out there on the web. I've downloaded the whole thing for free. And this was a very early effort to characterize and assemblage from a particular property and in a way a pioneering work. And interestingly, she didn't go on in the field, but she gave her data to Penelope Allison, who's kind of the doiness of this type of study now in the Roman world. She's at University of Leicester in the UK. She's from New Zealand, but did her PhD in Australia at the same time as Armit. And she included this in her very influential study of assemblages from 30 Pompeii households, which is published by the UCLA Cotson Institute. And then her student, Nick Ray, who did his PhD at the University of Leicester, took Allison's rendition of Armit's data and used that in his kind of path breaking and not so well known and still unpublished PhDs dissertation, which looked at artifact assemblages in the Roman world generally in Pompeii specifically, taking on board a lot of the theoretical and methodological work that's been done, for example, in North American historic archaeology. And so it turns out that one of our residences has this assemblage, which has figured in these two very prominent studies that gave us kind of a hook into those. And so that was another thing which made this block very interesting. Here's our two field teams in 2018, 2019. As you can see in the lower right in 2019, we had our bad days and our good days. And then we kind of had our in-between kind of days. And I'll be talking a bit about some of the work that these people have done. Now, the first part of our work is archival, which is kind of a challenge, because a lot of the basic archives have been sent out to be PDFed, which is a great thing, because they'll be able to be put online, but they're not available to anyone. But we've been struggling a bit. And we use principally two things. We have the very cryptic and entertaining the audio de scavi, the excavation day book, which kind of tells you what room they were digging in on what day and occasionally what they found and how many workmen they were and how much they were getting paid and stuff like that. And then of the artifacts that they recovered, a subset of those they decided were important enough to inventory, to assign a new one of the inventario. And each of those is provided with an inventory card. The system now has these kind of oak tag cards that are punched so that you could do kind of punch calculations and stuff like that. They're called a scada, a scada is the Italian word for any kind of fish or card or something like that. And the local slang, as they call them, they say the bufetti, because bufetti is the main stationary chain in Italy. And they had these printed up by bufetti, so you have to learn the jargon. And they say, mancrolli bufetti, it means like the catalog cards are missing. And so that's the basic item that we have to recover, though, from the big file of these to get some idea about where an artifact was recovered and when it was recovered and what they interpreted as and so on and so forth. We basically have been working in a newly rehabbed workroom, which did not exist in this UNESCO heritage site until two years ago at the main storage facility on site, conveniently located right across from the main bar restaurant at the site, which also has its own working bathroom, which is very famous of the site workers, because it was used by Hillary Clinton. So they call it the Hillary bathroom. Anyway, and it also gives us this buffo view out the window of Vesuvius right here. And so we can happily work here with a nice cross breeze. Here you see Sarah Erickson, who's one of your students now in anthropology, and Aaron Brown, one of our students in classical archeology, doing a digital scan of a sheet bronze casserole, which actually I'll talk about a little bit later today. So what I'm going to talk about are results we've obtained in our work on the first two of the, depending on my account, eight residences in the block. And one of them is this one right next door to the house of the Venus in Bikini, which goes by the name of the house, La Casa, the Lucius Hibonius Primus. That's the name of its possible owner. I'll tell you more about how we can know that if you slide down the road. And so that's 111, 58, because it has doorways at both five and eight. And that's a nice third quartile house. And so here in this view of the north facade of our block, here it is with its entrance at five right next door you see to Vane and Bikini at the northeast corner of the block. And then the second house that we did is this very modest one, the boundary of second and third quartile, the so-called Casa Imperiale, the imperial house, called that because of a depito on the facade. It has nothing to do with the emperor or anything like that. And that's around the corner here. So I'm showing you an arrow that it's up that little side street right there. And so that's a more modest sized residence than the first of the two. What you see in this image here is a bronze seal ring which has on its business end written in reverse the abbreviated name of Lucius Caillius Januarius. This is so how you could indicate your ownership of things. And this was recovered inside the so-called Casa Imperiale. And while it's not a certain identification, it does suggest that someone residing in that property was of this name and could well have been the owner of the property. And I would say that the first of the two houses, the Lucius Hibbonius primus, is similarly one that produced one of these seals with a man of that name. And so that may be the name of the owner of this property. That certain is by no means certain. What you see here is a plan at the bottom of the facade of the north end of the block. It was excavated by Spinazzola in 1914. And then a drawing of the elevation, which shows you, among other things, that there was a second story over part of this block. Spinazzola was obsessed with facades. And that's why he just dug all along the street and wrote this giant book all about facades at Pompeii. So we know a hell of a lot of about facades. And a lot of the houses he dug, he just dug a meter into them and quit, which was the case with our block until Majority started excavating there. You see in the 1950s where he excavated the rest of the block. And here is that image that was at the front of my talk that was asked about. This is from Spinazzola's 1953 publication. So 40 years after he dug it, a reconstruction of the facade of that block with an altar up the side street there. You can see at the right a bar right here at the corner of the bar counter. And the Causadilusia subonius primus down here. And the Causimperioli just out of sight up the alley there on the right hand side. So a little bit about how we work on these materials. It's pretty generally low tech. I have a low budget and a small group. And so much of what we do is just careful observation of things with the naked eye. And in particular, we're looking to gather information about various use alterations, which will give us some indication about what these particular artifacts were actually being used for and how intensively and if they were being curated and things of that sort. And we also are looking at what I like to call micro morphology. That is very small scale bits of evidence you can often see on the surface of artifacts, which give us some idea about the actual manufacturing techniques and the order in which they were undertaken. So those are the things that we've been focusing on in particular. Now to record our information, we have this vastly overdone by me database in FileMaker Pro 17 now, which has, I think, seven different tabs and 90-something different fields. And this is what we deploy for our in-depth description of a particular artifact. Needless to say, few artifacts require us to make comments in all of these fields. But if they have evidence of that kind, by God, we've got a place in the database where we can record it. And so you see how the tabs stacked here for you. We have our first one, which is basic identification and things of that sort and not particularly interesting. And then the second one is where we like to park some basic graphic documentation and some information about that. So we've got a field in which we can drop in a low-res picture. And if we take a photo micrograph with a digital microscope, we can drop it in here. And it's also the place where the person who's described the artifact can queue up our photographer, who's Susanna Fosbush, who's out there. So she knows what kind of shots we need, although she's really only about five feet away from us. So it's not like we can't just tell her. And then we go on to one, which is measurements, where we record some of that basic information. But we also like to look at other, let's say, characteristics, other attributes of artifacts that people don't often record. We weigh them, for example, because we're interested in understanding calculations of values, the amount of material we have as of interest to us. We also like to, for example, measure the maximum diameter of vessels to figure out maybe about how they could have been shelved and stored. We like to, for closed vessel forms, measure the minimum size of the aperture so you can figure out if you could get a hand in there or not. And so we record standard stuff, but also a few other things that most projects don't tend to pay attention to. We then move on to manufacture. We have various fields where we like to say what the evidence is that we have for the various steps involved in the manufacture of each artifact and then try to work them out in order. And so that's what we do on this tab here. Then we go to condition. And this is where we like to talk about the completeness and brokenness of artifacts and also in particular, use alterations, evidence for abrasion, breakage, chipping, the deposition of residues of various sorts, things like that. And so that's among the more important things that we record, and that goes on this tab here. Some of the objects will have either makers, marks on them, or they might have text painted onto them if it's a transport amp or something like that. So we have a page that's our epigraphy page where we have everything we have to say about text. And again, we can drop a picture of a maker's stamp and things like that. And then we have a final catch-all page where we can put information about various sorts of analyses we might do, like 3D scans or composition analysis. We're doing a collaborative project with the Second University of Naples, characterizing some of our materials from one of our sub-projects. And I also have a scheme for basically taking Harris Matrix software and tricking it into creating sort of a flowchart which allows us to document the different steps in production, which again, we have a box there that we can drop that into. So we deploy this database then to begin to structure our observations of the attributes or various artifacts and get all this stuff recorded. So I want to show you some of the kinds of results that we're getting so you can see the sorts of evidence that we have in particular for the use of these objects and a little bit about their manufacture. I'll say that in our database, we have one field on the first tab where we record what's the standard assumption about how any particular sort of artifact would have been or might have been used that's pretty broadly shared within our field. And then in our condition tab, we actually have a different field where we actually state what evidence we have about what we can say about how it actually was being used, right? So we try to keep these two things separate and keep both of them in mind. So we can start looking at some ceramics, but as I'll get to, we have very little ceramics from this block, weird, well, not weirdly, but disturbingly. So I'll say a little bit about that. In fact, I'll point out that we kind of have a situation opposite from typically what's the case in Roman archeology where if you quantified it some way, like 99% of your artifacts are ceramic and then your 1% is everything else. You have very little in particular glassware and metalware because both of those were intensively recycled in the ancient world. And so you rarely tend to find those, particularly when you're looking at discard contexts. Anyway, a bit about ceramics. Here's your standard kind of Roman dinner plate and Italian terra sigilata recovered by the excavators with these three giant chunks of the rim broken off. Here's a couple of detailed slides to show you that we'll find things like cut marks inside, right? On some occasions, which if you're an historical archeologist, of course, you're familiar with the phenomenon of efforts to interpret cut marks. And as is very often the case of these high end glossy slip tablewares, you also get a lot of attrition of the slip on the surface. So you have a detail of a rim here showing you how that's been abraded away. And indeed, we have a set of protocols which allows us to kind of quickly and conveniently characterize things like the location and the amount of surface loss through things like this. That's one of the things that we like to record, particularly about pottery. We've found a substantial amount of glass artifacts. Glass blowing is invented in the first century BC and it really revolutionizes the archeological record because glass goes from being kind of an expensive, high-end item to something that's mass manufactured. Here you have a standard balsamarium, a container for probably storing ungwents and things like that. Glass tends to be pretty inert though with respect to use alterations. This little ungwentarium here, of which we have about 40, you can maybe see it has these little teeny sort of transverse scratches around the interior of the mouth. My inference is that it has to do with the stoppering and unstoppering of that. But in fact, that's the only example of this that we've actually found. So glass tends not to be very communicative. Some glass vessels like this plate you see right here are kind of promising in the sense that their undersides show quite a bit of unstructured scratching in them, which seems to be scratching which occurred before this was excavated. Recall, this has been sitting on a shelf in a storeroom since about 1960. That is, some of the volcanic schmutz that you get on the surfaces of objects seems to be inside some of the scratches. And so this is kind of interesting that we are seeing this on this particular sort of vessel. And then we very occasionally get examples like this which show us deliberate modification. This is a flask of some sort. The upper end of the neck is missing and in this detail, you can see it has kind of a sub-regular break on it with a step in it. And if you know glass technology, you know that this probably had its neck removed by an operation called cracking off, which there's a great YouTube video from the Corning Museum of Glass. You wanna see how this works. If you have a glass vessel and you wanna get the top off it, you scribe a little horizontal line with some sharp object and then you rotate it over heat and the crack propagates around perfectly except where it comes back on itself, it often won't line up and make a little step. And so with this bottle, you can see that they cracked off the neck probably because the rim had broken, right? And so they wanted to modify this to allow them to keep it in use. But this is fairly uncommon with glass. Much more informative is our bronze, set of bronze vessels. Here you see a big bronze water bucket. It'd be called a citula in Latin. And this is super interesting because it has a big stiffening band and iron under the rim and then it has attachments for a basket handle. You see that would have pivoted that you could use to carry it around or to hang it on a well or sorry, a fountain head, something like that. And what's super interesting is when you look at this, you can see that in fact, even though it has this iron stiffening ring, the sheet bronze is really, really flexible. And you can see how it's dished, right? That there are high points at the handles and then it kind of curves down to a point intermediate between. And you can see that the presumably long-term use of this was kind of leading to this distortion of the vessel itself, even though it had this iron stiffener. Here's a standard cauldron like you find in the Roman world. And this again showed some kind of interesting use alterations. Maybe a bit hard to read you, you can't see this, but this is a detail of the underside where it kind of comes to a little bit of a point. And you can't see it, but there's a perfect divot X in the middle. That's to do with the technique that was used to raise this from a sheet of bronze. But all around that, all that dark material you can see is quite heavy deposition of soot, which confirms that this was being used over a heat source, set up high enough that the tips of the flames were actually depositing soot directly on the exterior. The interior, you can see in a detail right here, is covered with a very thick deposit of this light-colored material, which we haven't analyzed, but it seems pretty clear that it's lime-scale. And so what this shows us is the vessel was being used over a long term for presumably just the boiling of water, or at least the heating of something which contained a lot of the hard water from Pompeii. But these are understood to be classic water boiling cauldrons. And on the right-hand side, you see a detail of a handle attachment where on the inside, you can see a couple of the rivets that have been pulled through. And this is different on this side and much sloppier here than the other side, which is very neat and regular. And it looks as though they actually reattached the handle at a later period, involving a less attentive or less skilled crafts person, the person who did the original attachment. So again, you can see this evidence for the long-term curation of these things. Here is, again, a similar sheet bronze and iron casserole. And again, lots of interesting evidence for its use alteration. These are very valuable. What you have above is a detail of the exterior. Just down here, the bend in the wall, and maybe you can make out a couple of rivets, and then there's a rectangular patching sheet behind. And so this was extensively patched, particularly in that part of the vessel, which was probably more subject to stress. Now on the interior here, just opposite, you can see that they took what was probably lead putty and smeared it around the inside to seal off that sort of repair. And so it indicates this interest in the curation of these valuable objects to keep them in use. And there are similar forms in ceramic, but of course, ceramic can't be repaired the same way. And so the bronze objects give us some interesting insights. On the other side is a detail of the rim, and it may be a bit hard for you to see, but you can, again, see where some iron rivets are coming through for the original attachment of a stiffening collar. But off to the side, there's a second set of perforations where it seems like, again, they were messing around with the rim area of this vessel to try to bring it back into a workable condition. I'll finish with a bronze inkwell with its matching lid, which would have been attached to a little hinge. I guess Sarah Erickson is Sarah here. No, she's not. She was our inkwell specialist, so she knows a lot more about this. But this one was super cool because you can not only see the seam up the side where they took a sheet and rolled it and brought it around and started it back up, but it actually had a quite substantial amount of dark, organic-looking material inside, which was actually analyzed by an archeometric team in the past and was shown, in fact, to be ink. And so that was kind of cool to find all that stuff preserved and in situ. So those are the sorts of observations we're able to make of our objects and all go into our database. And then we can, once we have this, step back and look at what we can say about not only what was the set of objects that was in the possession of any particular residential group, but also how they were being used and how they were being curated and see if we can gain some understanding about patterns in this. And this brings me really to the issue that I wanna finish up with, which is assemblage analysis. Now, again, maybe it was optimistic. I don't know if anyone can see any of this, but here is the plan of Lucas Hibonius-Premus here with a table which summarizes room by room, the number of the room, what we think the main use of the room was, and then a really quick shorthand listing of the various artifacts that are documented as having been recovered in that room. Each of those numbers represents a number in a scheme that I'm gonna show you in a table, a couple of slides down the road, but each number refers to particular artifact grouping and where you have a colon and then a number following a first number, that's multiple examples of that that were found in that particular room. But as you'll see, we only have artifacts attested in room three and room four, and so the question emerges what was going on either in those other rooms or with the excavation of those other rooms. Here's a similar scheme for the Casa Imperiale, which again shows you that we have artifacts from only three spaces, and one of those that I've labeled X, we can't quite identify with one of those in the plan based on our archival work so far, but I'm optimistic we'll be able to, I suspect it's that one where I've placed it, but I can't prove that and we'll have to try to get to that. Now, one of the things that leaps out, which I referred to is that there's almost no pottery from any of these residences, and that's a function of the fact that the excavators in the 1950s and 1960s like basically didn't care about pottery, it was too unimportant, and so they were not collecting and inventorying it, and I've tried hard to look at these lemons and see it as lemonade, for example, if they had collected all the pottery, the number of artifacts we had to characterize would increase at least 10 and more likely 20 times, and so I would never be able to finish even one of these houses in my lifetime, and for instance, I'll get to in a minute, it might be that actually pottery's kind of, and I'm a Roman pottery specialist, it's kind of less interesting and less important than the other elements of the assemblages that we have. At Pompeii, even though they weren't collecting the pottery, they did employ an artist to go around after excavation and do these very nice sketches of the houses after they finished excavating them, and here are two that have been published from the courtyard of the Cosimperiale showing in fact some of the amphorae and one cookpot, and over here a doleum, a big water storage vessel that in fact were recovered in this property but never inventoried by the archeologists. What I think is likely the case is they didn't just take all this stuff and throw it, but they didn't want to invest labor in it, so they collected it and shipped it off to their main storage facility in this place called the Granada Foto, the granaries of the Forum, where it sits today in these vast rows, kind of like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, with bars outside. If you go to the Pompeii Forum in the northwest corner, there's always these mobs of people in front of this one building staring through the bars, and that's the looking into the Granada Foto because there's a couple of like the cast of dead people and stuff like that in there. You can see one of them kind of here in between two of the shelves. So probably much of our pottery wound up in the Granada Foto, but it's not inventoryed and we simply can't know what it was, and so whatever we do has to take that into account. Now, what I want to do in six minutes is talk a little bit about these two assemblages by comparing them, one from a farmhouse that we worked on during the first phase, sub-project one, this is the Villa Regina Boscoreale, 1.2 kilometers outside Pompeii. This is a farmhouse that was dug in its entirety in the late 70s, early 80s as a model excavation. Here you see it in this giant hole in the ground. It's been re-roofed and restored. And the idea was to collect all the artifacts that they found, and so here's some basic background on that. It was published in a monograph, so that's nice. All that work is done, and we started our project actually with that. Here's a similar treatment of the artifacts from use-related contexts inside the Villa with a table like you saw before and a plan of the Villa with the vineyards around it. These have all been studied and we know it was the kind of center of a viticulture, small viticulture estate. It had this one Bafo store room where they actually took plaster casts of what had been the wooden shelving, and they were able to sort of reconstruct what sets of objects were sitting on what shelf and the kind of thing you can only do at Pompeii, so it's got some very cool data. Now, what I wanted to do was to look at these assemblages from these two modest in-town residents and compare them with this farmhouse, and so this obviously you can't see, but what this is, I'll give you a somewhat more legible version in a moment. I took all the artifacts and divided them into groupings as a function of their material and manufacture technique and their function, their form, and their size, and so each of these invisible rows is one of these 105 categories that I've got, and then I've identified the kinds of objects that are in each one, and then using some hocus pocus that I won't go into now, I signed each one a costliness value on a scale from 0 to 10 as a function of its material and size and so on and so forth. There's a way of meaning to estimate how valuable these things would be. Now, this may be somewhat legible. This is the upper part of that, the first 24 of these groups, so you can see a bit about what I've done. So I started with they're organized by activity, so I start with water acquisition and storage, then I go on to lighting and then down to various cooking operations and so on and so forth. So that's what these groupings represent, sets of artifacts that would have been used for those particular purposes as a function of their material and so on and so forth. And so I can look at them this way and compare across the properties and get a sense about what sorts of activities are recorded in one property and not in another or in two and not the third and things of that sort. And I've learned some interesting things which I probably won't go into right now, but you can also, of course, reorder them and here they're reordered in descending costiness value. So you can also look at residents by residents and see who is having putatively expensive objects and all the way down to the lower cost objects. This is another way of shaking and baking those data. Now, as a way to start approaching this, I used an article from my former colleague at SUNY at Albany, later Arizona State, Mike Smith, a very well-known Aztecista, maybe many have used his work. He did this great article in 1987 trying to look for, was there really a correlation in household possessions and wealth? And so he did things like he took colonial documents and broke them down to different kinds of wealth and then sort of examined what sorts of durable goods you might actually find archeologically as he's doing here. And then he looked at ethnographic work. Here's one done in a tenement in Mexico City where they sort of costed out the sorts of possessions that different families had and the higher the wealthier ones and less wealthy ones and stuff like that. And he also summarized some data which has really captivated me using the gutman scale. I don't know if people use gutman scales or if they're passe in cultural anthropology, but basically what they're based on is that as a function either of the wealth of a household or kind of the maturity of a household, people will tend to acquire durable goods in a particular order and if you freeze the action, look at any particular household, the more mature or wealthy other households aren't gonna have and you can order all of these sorts of goods in a scale. And so if a household owns an air conditioner, it's also going to have a television set and whatever else, a radio or something like that. And you can scale all these things. Looks like cross-culturally, there tend to be, obviously there are anomalies, but these things do tend to sort out. And so as I thought about how to work with our highly defective artifact data, which exclude ceramics and also are not reporting material from entire rooms, which might have certain, let's say certain functional implications, I began to think that a gutman scale offers us some ways to move forward with this sort of thing. First of all, the limits to lemonade thing is that ceramics are all very low-cost items. So they're all gonna be very, very low down on the gutman scale and so the absence of those is not gonna actually mean your missing data is gonna differentiate between households of different wealth levels, for instance, right? And so that's kind of a relief. And then this issue about missing big chunks of assemblage I thought a bit about and it seemed to me that the way to go was to try to maybe not use a single gutman scale, but to come up with multiple ones that you could then sort of use as various measures and if you happen to miss certain functional kinds of artifacts as determined by a regular excavation, that wouldn't be fatal to your ability to rank these things. Now, it turns out that there's a shareware software package that maybe you all use called Anthropac, which has an option which allows you to kind of create and analyze gutman scales. It doesn't work on max though. So I hope to move forward with that. And so I've been looking at things like what sorts of artifacts co-occur in all three residences and these are boring things, a small ceramic drinking cup, a ceramic lamp and a glass ball samarium. So these are things that are gonna be pretty broadly owned by people, but if I think about ways to move forward with the gutman scale approach, what I wanna do is define again these different activity categories like lighting and within those, we have your widely diffused throwaway like a light bulb or a cigarette lighter, ceramic terracotta lamp, you have your much higher end cast bronze lamp and then you have lighting related equipment like this tabletop lamp stand in bronze you see over here. So you can begin to sort of scale different sorts of objects from widely owned to more narrowly owned, sort of following the kind of ideas that you have behind the gutman scale and you can do this with various sets of things. Clothed cooking vessels, an ola, that's where the Spanish word oya comes from from Latin in ceramic and then in sheet bronze here, just show you a few of these. Wine drinking cups, a little terracotta cup which you just saw here, one in glass which is somewhat more costly arguably and then finally sorry for the bad photograph it's from an exhibit in Melbourne, Australia because we couldn't photograph the thing directly in silver, right, this is a very high end vessel. And on and on, plates, ceramic, glass, cast bronze right here for drink serving, ceramic, glass, cast bronze and a few more of these, a little bit different for the storage of high value things like ungwinson perfumes, blown glass, glass blown into a funky mold which makes it shape like a date and lastly a little container that's actually cut out of rock crystal, right? So again, you can scale these sorts of things and I think this is the last one, writing with ink, here we have a ceramic ink well and here we have one of these bronze ink wells like I was looking at. The idea is maybe I can define sets of these and the fact that something doesn't have date in one is not fatal to our ability to sort of rank it with respect to the other households and that's kind of the way I intend to move forward with these sorts of things. Oh yeah, there's one last thing, fun thing. People love stridgels. When I went to go to the bath, they'd lather themselves in olive oil and take this thing, it was like a miniature high-lie thing and they would scrape the oil and dirt off their body, right? And here we have a couple of iron stridgels on a ring, low-end stridgels and here we have a nice bronze stridgel which was once on a iron ring you can see right there which we don't find at the farmhouse by the way, only people in town were going to the baths apparently. Anyway, results to finish up. I'm presenting things on my lab's website which you can go visit if you want to see some of the stuff we're doing on this or other projects and back to our happy crew. I'll point out that Aaron Brown, a PhD student in classical archeology is doing his dissertation on food preparation practices at Pompeii principally looking at the material culture that we're recovering in the houses to do with food preparation and Susanna Fastbush who's out here is about to embark on an MA thesis where she's super interested in textile production and we have a lot of material culture needles in particular which haven't been well understood so she's gonna kind of dig in and look at needles at Pompeii, what they're like, what they could be used for, where they're found and not found, to gain some insights about that sort of evidence for textile work. And here I'm thanking people like the ARF as you can see for support of the project and so that's an overview of what we went up to. I'd be happy to answer any non-hostile questions that you might have or if I've lost over things because I had like twice as much stuff as I could present I'll be happy to clarify those, okay? Thank you. Ken. So you're working really with a museum essentially, and so is there a real difference from that earlier excavation to the later excavation in terms of the context recording and does that really affect how things are, how you're able to really look at some of the materials in your institute? Yes and not really in the sense that beginning in the 1970s, the Antiquity Service put a moratorium on new excavation at Pompeii from the surface down because they had this massive site that was exposed to the elements and not properly studied or published. Since then there have been only very, very few new excavations that aren't excavating and already excavated areas to clarify stratigraphic issues and stuff like that. And so new excavation is done much more up to what would be normal international standards but we're not working on any of that material because that's all like important people have that and they're not going to give it to us. So we're working almost exclusively with materials that were recovered. I think one exception is the Villa Regina farmhouse which was high quality, but our stuff from inside the town is pretty much stuff that was recovered in circumstances which wouldn't be the way you do it today. So I see earlier material. Yeah. But the idea is to find particular contexts which are ones that are relatively good and also that promise you particularly informative about issues of artifact life history. So surface deposits of refuse on streets, things like that which give us these little windows into some of those sorts of issues. Thanks. Sarah. So when people are doing research like if she's going to be looking at needles, does she have to go manually through these sheds or these carts and like find every... Every damn needle. In a haystack. Yeah. Right. Remcomago Tettigisti. That's Latin for get the nail in the head which means you touch something with the needle. Anyway, Jeeves says it all the time and Bertie and Jeeves knows. Anyway. Yes. And it's not computerized, but they're moving towards that. But here's the positive thing. Susanna knows that back in the magazino in the store, I mean the Casa de Baco storage facility, there's a cardboard box with like 400 freaking needles in it. So they're all there. So basically I think she'll be able to reverse engineer her list by taking the needles and getting the inventory numbers that are on them. It's kind of like having a bunch of books with a card catalog on it and then going back and finding it in the catalog itself. And can you coordinate with others? Well my aspiration would be that I mean, the Particle Archeologico is doing its own work to try to bring this stuff into some kind of organized thing. My aspiration is to, when I can finally publish this stuff, maybe make the point that some of the things we're doing are useful enough that other people can design projects that we'll be able to interface with the data that we generate. Now that might be wildly optimistic because everyone thinks they've got the best idea. Whereas I actually have the best idea. But that would, that's kind of the idea that we have. But it's a vast mass of stuff. Yes, Christine. Do you think that you're in your villa but they were fancier, richer people than your folks were being in Switzerland? Actually the opposite. This is a relatively modest villa. They're big fancy mansion-like estates where they have silver services and all this kind of stuff. This is kind of the poster child for like a lower, medium rank villa. I should confess that I didn't go into this but there was a big earthquake in Pompeii in 1862, 17 years before the eruption. And so the town was kind of like if you went to New Orleans a couple years after Hurricane Katrina, it's not like a normal town. And many of the structures in Pompeii were clearly damaged in the quake and never reoccupied in kind of partial or anomalous ways. And this farmhouse looks like it was being used but not lived in. I won't go into the details. The kitchen, they just let the kitchen ash build up right over the cooktop and kind of like frat boys, putting dishes in the sink until that's full and then they'll start putting them in the sink in the bathroom instead of like washing the dishes. And what they did is they then took their storeroom where I showed you that shelving sequences but there's like a little hearth built in the corner there. So it looks like after they like filled up the kitchen with kitchen ash instead of like taking out the garbage and said screw it we're going to build another, you know. The idea is there might have been workmen in the vineyards who were actually using this residence kind of as their day house for lunch and naps and stuff like that. And so, but everything in Pompeii is complicated that way, you know. Like nothing's beautifully inter, you know, it ain't no neutron bomb situation, you know. But nonetheless what's striking is the farmhouse that we've gone into has produced almost no glass, you know, 90% of the fines there are ceramic and the other 10% there's like three glass vessels and three bronze vessels. And so if you compare those absolute numbers of what we have in the houses in town there, the quantities are quite different and also qualitatively kind of the sorts of things we have are also different in some interesting ways. You know, 1.4 kilometers in town like you couldn't walk into town in 15 minutes, you know. All right, the cash was created by archaeologists. They put them all in one box. But that's a, I'll kind of fudge on that answer that it looks as if you know, textile manufacture was largely farmed out and was going on inside residences and which would not be surprising. We do know the Roman state and late empire had these giant textile manufactories because they were producing garments for soldiers and officials and stuff like that but that's a very distinct sort of operation. You do find loom weights and the issue is is that, you know, you would need multiple loom weights to actually tension a loom and there aren't many cases like you find one loom weight, two loom weights and like, you know, what do you do with that? Or they use them as paper weights and so there aren't many cases where sets of loom weights have been found suggesting that in fact what you're looking at is a place where a loom was set up and no longer exists but the weights, they're typically they're usually ceramic, occasionally lead that's another kind of thing I suppose you kind of scale in terms of the value of the material. Yeah, okay, good. Well yeah, good question that the what I showed you now is just something I kind of did quickly to get this article out and but if you think about how you could in some useful way estimate the relative cost of different kinds of artifacts certainly the, this gets back to a certain article written many years ago by a guy named Kent Lightfoot about the production oh, Kent's already gone so he can't bask in it this production step measure article I suppose it seems reasonable to suppose that there's some correlation to the complexity and number of operations involved in manufacturing object and in some sense it's cost and so yeah, that will be one of the factors that when I do this in a serious way I will, we record all those deliberately for this reason in part so the material, the manufacturing process which involves the different operations and the nature of the operations and some extent kind of the expertise involved in doing those are all things that I want to factor in but I want to be deliberately vague because clearly all I can do is come up with some kind of approximation that might correspond with some ancient Roman reality so I don't want to lean too heavily on any claim about these things but in objects in a particular material I feel fairly confident I can sort out kind of an escalating cost in terms of the operations involved in making it when you try to bridge between bronze and ceramics, glass, things like that that of course gets somewhat trickier so, did I answer your question? yeah, I did oh, the Harris Matrix basically they want everything to begin to the ground level and end with virgin soil and what I want is like raw material preparation and ending with a finished object I used to cut the end off it's not very clever, I'm not a very IT adept person oh yeah, alright, good, I'm glad that something about it is useful it's just, you know, it's the basic Mike Schiffer thing but with a bunch of Roman stuff plugged in there as a classicist we're all obliged to that okay, alright, thank you for your attendance and see you all next week