 Hello, and welcome to Ask an Archaeologist. I'm Nico Tripsovich, the host of today's show. Ask an Archaeologist is a series of live streamed interviews co-hosted by the Archaeological Research Facility and the PBA Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. In this series, UC Berkeley archaeologists and others who work with archaeological materials discuss their research and answer audience questions. For those of you joining us live today, you can post your questions in the live chat box. You'll find a Jay symptom to the YouTube video. So today we are delighted to be speaking with Professor Jay Theodore-Penya. Welcome, Ted. Hi, pleased to be here. Thanks for having me. Dr. Ted Penya is a professor of Roman Archaeology in the Department of Classics at UC Berkeley. He came to us from SUNY Buffalo in 2009 and he will be presenting Making Sense of Material Culture at Pompeii, which will show us some of the latest research results from the Pompeii Artifact Life History Project. So I'm looking forward to hearing about your work, Ted. Okay, so I can take it away? Yeah. And do screen share here. Okay, yeah, I'll just talk a little bit about a few minutes about what I've been up to doing research at Pompeii in the last few years since 2012 and then answer whatever questions people might have. The project is called the Pompeii Artifact Life History Project. Its acronym is PALHIP. And what it's concerned with, as I'm alluding to in the slide you have now is the thrust of the project is to study portable material culture at Pompeii, the small objects that are found in and around the houses at Pompeii and sites immediately outside the town to better understand the life history of the artifact in the Roman world, how things flow through the systemic context from their manufacturer to their acquisition to their use, their maintenance, their repair, their recycling, their discard, things of that sort. Pompeii is unusually a good place to do this because we have of course so many sets of artifacts that were in use at the time that the site was, the town was destroyed. So we have an unusual opportunity to study the life history of artifacts. And so since 2012, I've been going out with a small team. Here you see our 2008 team, actually, usually four or five people, grad students from UC Berkeley. And what we do is we work in the stirrums at Pompeii, very carefully evaluating and describing sets of objects that were excavated in the past by other projects because there are endless amounts of this stuff that had never been properly studied. We're particularly interested in looking at what we call use alterations. That is effects on artifacts that come from their use, sooting on pots, abrasion, dents, things like that. So we can gain some understanding of what these items were actually being used for. What I've been doing in recent months really since the beginning of the year is doing a deep dive into some of our data and in particular looking at the sets of artifacts, the assemblages that have come from three modest residences. Two of these are inside the town of Pompeii and one is about 1.2 kilometers farmhouse outside the town. The first two are in this block I've highlighted for you in red. Pompeii's divided into nine regiones and each regio into insuli blocks as a modern archeological convention. So we're in regio one insula 11 where we're doing a systematic study of all of the assemblages of artifacts that were found in a series of eight plus or minus residences. Here you see on the right a plan of the insula, the block on the left, a satellite photo of what you see today with many of the houses re-roofed and whatnot. And in particular, we're looking at two properties. Here's a table which lays out the names, the different properties and their dimensions and ground floor area and so on and so forth. We're looking at one, this house, the so-called casa house of Lucius Hibonius primus that you see here in the north end of the block. And then secondly, this somewhat smaller residence here on the west side of the block that's referred to as the casa imperiale, somewhat inflatedly, the imperial house. And that, in fact, we should be calling something a bit different. We should be calling it the house of Lucius Kylius Januarius because as is sometimes the case at Pompeii and in fact was the case in this other house, Hibonius primus, we find a bronze seal ring like you see here, which has a name on it. And we can often assume that the name is is that of the most recent owner of the house at the time of 8079 when the eruption occurred. So if you look at this, you can see in reverse, L in the upper right, Kyli finishing the first row and then Januarius in the second row. And so we surmise that the main residence in this house was a Lucius Kylius Januarius. Now, we do a lot of work with the extant documentation from these houses. They were dug way back in 1960s with the documentation's kind of crummy. We have the upper right, the so-called mysteriously named Quaderni Neri, the black notebooks, which are their daybooks. And then we also have the standard catalog card, the Scata Bufetti named after the standard chain of stationers in Italy, Bufetti, which is produced for each inventory object. So we work with those, let me work with the objects. A lot of the excavation done back in this time was not up to modern standards. And so often we're dependent upon things like these published sketches not the time of excavation, showing us two views of the courtyard in the Cosiddini Kylius Januarius that you see right here. Showing us pottery because while at that time, the archaeologists would collect artifacts and metal and in glass and things like that. They considered pottery was kind of boring. And so they would gather it all up and send it off to the vast storeroom at the Grenadiel photo like you see right here. And they would save it, but they wouldn't indicate where it came from. And so for these couple of houses, we have actually very little of the pottery assemblage to work with, which in a way can be a good thing for reasons I discussed in an earlier lecture at the ARF. But this storage facility is kind of like, it's right off the form. They're always mobs of tourists hanging on the grate outside at Staring Angus. It looks kind of like the last scene of Raiders with a lost Ark with thousands of these vessels. We also, besides looking at portable artifacts, we recover a lot of indirect evidence for storage furniture, because I'm really interested in these last few months understanding how Romans situated things, how they dispose them around their houses so we can better understand that aspect of Roman culture. So we find stuff like what you see here, bronze fittings, which tell us about the storage furniture in which a lot of this stuff was actually being stored. So at the top, you have a big flat hinge, strap hinge. Below that to the left, you have a angled overlay hand, which might've been used, let's say, for the top of a trunk. You have the far right, a ring pole that you could use to pull out a drawer or a door. And at the bottom center, what you have is an iron, rather a lead deadbolt from a slide lock, which were often mounted in these storage cabinets and things like that. We can see a little bit of actually iron transfer and wood transfer on it. So using this kind of stuff and then other evidence we have for actual Roman storage furniture. And here you see some casts in the house of Giulio Polibio at the bottom and a detail of one of those plaster casts made where they found the wooden voids where these storage units had been. And on the upper right, you see a reconstruction of one of these that's today in a museum in Rome. So we're paying particular careful attention to understanding the storage furniture and the side which these objects were being stored. And we also find evidence for smaller storage boxes of the kind you see indicated here in a reconstruction at the top left and right and then in a Roman fresco at the bottom. So we're trying to figure out like where Romans really were keeping things and where they would put them and issues of that sort. The other structure outside Pompeii, here we have a satellite image which shows you Pompeii with the green push pen and then up to the upper left 1.2 kilometers, not quite a mile away is the so-called Villa de Gina of Boscoreale. And this was this modest farmhouse that was excavating its entirety a bit later, right? The other houses were in the 1960, this was excavated 1978 to 80 by which time they'd made a lot of progress in bringing excavation methods up to more modern standards. Here's the farmhouse that's just been re-roofed in this gigantic hole in the ground because they excavated also the fields immediately around it which produced a lot of interesting evidence as well. And here's a plan of that farmhouse, a big central courtyard with some giant wine storage, dolia in it with various residential and farm produce processing rooms spread around it. Now here we have quite different opportunities. Here's a view of the main storage room where the archaeologists actually were able to take plaster casts of shelves on the wall and a storage unit set on the floor and actually recover the sets of objects that were being disposed in each of these areas. And so we're doing a lot of work with this to understand how Romans were placing things around their structures so we can situate what we have. I've more recently been doing some work with understanding the flow of objects in and around Roman houses. So here you see a plan of one of those two houses inside the town we just talked about. This is Hibbonius primus. The number at the top of my slide is actually wrong. Should say 111-58, not 17, my apologies there. I'm indicating you to you the three areas that produce large selections of artifacts probably placed in storage furniture. And so I'm doing things like using a technique that's used by architects creating access graph, justified access graphs, which help us understand the spaces and the structure and how they're connected and how people can move into and through a structure from the outside. So here you see a justified access graph for this house. But I'm tweaking it a bit to pay attention more to how objects could circulate around the house. And so I call these modified graphs that I'm making justified material culture access graphs. And here you see one of those that I've worked up for this house to give you some sense about how I'm trying to understand how people could actually gain access to things and thus why they were putting them where they were inside the house. I've got a bunch more slides that go on and look at individual artifacts from the house. It may be that those are worth looking at in the conversation. I think I've probably spoken long enough. So I think what I need to do now is maybe stop the slide share and go back to my interlocutor so we can address some questions that people might have. Sure. Well, we actually have a few questions coming in now. One of them is about some of your slides. So it might be worth keeping the- Going back to screen sharing on. Yep. Okay. Well, read the question here. What is the glass object that was shown at the start of the presentation? That's, I'm not sure I can get to that very quickly or efficiently. That's a small blown glass vessel that's mimicking a wine skin and shape. So it's called an asgos. We use the Greek word for that. But this object is actually quite small. It's probably only about, oh, let's say six inches long. And so it's probably a little miniature single serving wine picture, I suppose you can call it. But it's in the form you see of a little wine skin. That's why it's got that floppy shape. Yeah. And it has, does it have like a pointed end to mimic? Yeah, let me see if I can go back to it here. It's all the way in my title slide. It'll take me a while to get there. But yeah, as I indicated in my abstract but didn't have time to get to, in particular, I'm a pottery specialist but I've spent much of the shelter in place time trying to expand my knowledge of Roman glass, which is a quite different specialization. And I'm kind of getting there. So this is a little tiny, here we go, blown glass vessel. One of the interesting things is that one of the very few technological innovations that we see occur in the Roman world is the blowing of glass, which is invented sometime, discovered sometime around the middle or third quarter of the first century BC. We are about 100 years after that. And one of the things we can do with glass assemblages at Pompeii is see how the suite of techniques that come to represent glass blowing, as we've known it now for many hundreds of years, are kind of first elaborated. And so glass blowing seems simple and natural to us but it actually was kind of a tricky thing for people to figure out how to do and how to do well. And so this is an example of a fairly early on blown glass vessel. Well, that seems like a subject that's ripe for some geochemical study. Perhaps we can XRF the earlier and later phases of the glass production. Yeah, one of the tricky things though is that raw glass is only made in a couple of places in the Roman world, in Egypt and in Sero-Palestine. And that has a very particular stabilizer to help fingerprint for each of those areas. And then we get shipped around the Roman world but the Romans would intensively recycle glass. And so what you gather these, that the secondary workshops could use virgin raw glass from one of those areas or recycled glass or some combination of that. And so what we're learning is is that the chemical fingerprints of glass don't really tell us very much because it's all stuff that's mixed around. I see. So I wanna remind our viewers that they can post questions to the YouTube live chat comment box and we'll present them to our speaker or speaking with Ted Pena from the UC Berkeley Classics Department. Here's another question that's come in. Can you speculate about the rope work and knotting use in the furniture? It doesn't survive, but is it likely there was a lot of bags and nets and pulleys? Well, I wouldn't think so much in storage furniture but for things like beds, for example, from which we have some very nice specimens from Herculaneum where the wooden furniture was kind of flash carbonized. And so instead of finding voids where it rotted away which you can try to recover through casts at Herculaneum, you actually have the original furniture and there you can get a much better sense about these sorts of things. And so it is clear, for example, that there were wooden bed frames which then had rope crossing between hauls drilled in the frame as the support for then the mattress that would have been on top of that. So we're not finding that evidence directly at Pompeii and I wouldn't expect much of it to exist for storage furniture, cabinets and armoires and chests and things like that that interests me. That's more an issue of typically bronze hinges and latches and locks and pulls, sometimes iron used for that. And also the hinges for boxes and smaller chests were also made out of animal bone. And so we do find that sometimes. We have a question here about the working at Pompeii. Yeah. You have a sense of how many different projects are active at Pompeii these days and how and if you collaborate with other projects? That's a tough question in part because of the American academic calendar where I can work in Pompeii kind of in June or July, August, everyone's on vacation so you can't really work then. And most European academics don't start up again maybe until the end of September or October so they often prefer to work at other times of the year. So I will overlap with a certain number of projects who are there when I'm there but there are many others that could be going on that I would not know about. Pompeii is a very, very large place. The area inside the walls is 65 hectares. I'll multiply that by two and a half if you want to get your acreage. But I certainly have relations with any number of other projects from many different nations that are involved working there. We see each other socially quite a bit. Pompeii's a smallish town so we'll go out for dinner or have a July 4th party for the Americans or because there are various other American projects working there. But I have Italian colleagues and British colleagues and Spanish colleagues and Finnish colleagues and people from many, many different countries principally Western Europe and North America. And you perhaps have symposia and conferences where you get together and chat about your findings. Yeah, yeah. So for instance, a couple of years ago we had one on recent discoveries about the production of pottery at Pompeii where in one of the sub-projects we did we were exiting a big garbage dump thrown over the wall that had been studied in the past and we pretty quickly figured out that this garbage dump contained a lot of waste or pottery, pottery that was misfired that hadn't been kind of understood as such by the earlier archaeologists who worked on it. And so what we think we have is refuse middens of stuff dumped over the wall that had a very small percentage of materials that must have been deriving from a workshop somewhere probably at no great distance. And by looking at their rejects we were able to come up with some understanding of the suite of forms that they used. And here we did collaborate with archaeologists from the University of Naples, Federico Secondo, an archaeometric unit there to actually do a compositional and physical characterization of these so we could better understand the raw materials being used and how they were being processed. Here's another question. Can you tell us a little about how you used the plaster casting that you mentioned? Well, I don't do it, but this is a technique that was discovered in Pompeii in the mid-19th century actually that the archaeologists kept finding these strange voids and sometimes the voids would have artifacts associated with them and it was finally figured out that what these were were in effect cast that were left were organic material had been surrounded in the lapilli which had sort of solidified the organic material decomposed except for the hard parts like human bones that would fall to the bottom of this void. And if you tapped into the void and just cut a little hole into it and then poured liquid plaster inside, let the plaster set and then excavated away the lapilli what you would have as a cast of what was there. It could be a dead person or a dead animal. It could be a piece of furniture also. In the 80s and 90s, the archaeologists there got the idea of using kind of a resin to do this rather than plaster. Reasoning that the resin would be a lot lighter and more robust in the plaster. Plus it was transparent. So you could kind of see stuff trapped inside it. And what's emerged in the last few years is that this resin isn't stable. It's starting to get cloudy. And so it no longer has some of the positive attributes. But I don't do this, but it's a technique that's been done in various points in the past. And it allows you to do things at Pompeii like if you're careful and lucky to take casts of furniture, although there's been so much of that done. It's been done more with animals and things like that. Yeah, I have heard of people using 3D laser scanners as well now to rather than casting, they actually scan the, I guess they're scanning the casts and then 3D printing the replicas. I suppose if you could introduce a scanner into a void you could try to scan the inside of the void. I guess that dentists now and internists and people and medicine have kind of techniques for doing that, but that's pretty big budget kind of stuff compared to our very, very modest archaeological budgets. That's right. All right, here's another question about one of the slides you shared. The amphora are often pictured piled and stacked in ways that involve sawdust or dirt. I wonder if a lot of it could have been suspended in slings or hammock-ish rope work. Well, let me try to get to that slide. You're probably referring to the fact that many classes of amphora, here we go, like those in the bottom row here, terminate in a point or a spike or a toe, as we call it. Others, like you see in that second shelf up are actually flat bottomed amphora. And moderns are often puzzled by the pointy amphora. They think, well, gosh, that doesn't make sense. They'd fall over, right? So maybe your question is getting on with that. We do know that they were simply leaned against things like you see here. They could be set in a hole in the ground. There could be terracotta rings that they could be set into. They're principally containers for shipping, and so when you're trying to lay them that is put them as cargo, packed them onto a ship, actually having a point is an advantage because they're being put against the planking of the hull, which is curved, and a big flat bottom wouldn't fit against that so well, whereas a point just touches it in one area. You pack them together really tightly, but you place in between them, done it in some kind of soft object, like a rag or a pine bough or something like that. So when the ship sails and cargo starts to shift, they're not gonna rub against each other and start wearing hulls in each other, so by the end of the voyage, I have a bunch of empty amphorae. So they would be packed together like that. But I guess one final point is that that point, besides being good for using amphora as cargo on ships, is also really a third handle. And so they'd be sealed up, and so you could grab it by one of the two regular handles, grab it by the spike at the bottom, and heft it up and put it on your shoulder and carry it on your shoulder, holding onto that spike is a third handle, right? And so they were very intelligent design also for this reason. If they had compact handles that didn't stick out, you could also put them down and you could roll them like a barrel on wharves and stuff like that. At least people are suspecting that now and how many direct evidence for that. Yeah, and I know that high quality wine has a punt in the bottom of the bottle and that concentrates the sediments around the perimeter. So I wonder if that has a similar function. Probably so. I did some work with a wine maker outside Portland, Oregon, who makes his own big terracotta. He calls them amphorae, but they really wouldn't be called a dolium, a big Roman storage jar. And I spent some time talking with him and it turns out that the shape of the jar in which you're fermenting your wine actually conditions the circulation of the must and then forming wine inside. And so it matters quite a bit about what the actual curvature of the wall is and things like that with respect to the, how the wine is gonna ferment and the sort of product you're gonna get. And so yeah, the form of these things would have mattered probably for that reason as well. All right, we have a few more questions here. Was there a standard set of pottery vessels that you find in all or almost all houses? And if so, what does it say about the activities of the house? Well, yeah, that in Roman Italy there are basically three main kinds of cooking vessels that we find in ceramic. There's a Ola in Latin, a cook pot, which is a jar shaped thing. There is a casserole, which in Latin is called a cockabus and then there's a kind of a flat pan. And those are your three recurring forms you find over and over and over again, 98% of cookware assemblages are those, well together with the lid that goes on the cook pot but not on the casserole or the pan. Well sometimes on the pan there's some big lids as well. And so there seem to have been these three distinct operations. And by looking at the soothing that we find, this use alteration on the exterior of both ceramic and also these vessels are made sheet bronze as well on sheet bronze examples of these. We've been able to tell a bit about how they were used in the sense that the casserole's have pretty uniform thick dark gray black sooting all the way around, which suggests they were probably set up on a cooking stand of some sort where the tip of the flame where the soot is is going all around the exterior. The cook pots on the other hand show that type of sooting in the middle and upper part of the wall and even all the way up to the rim but the underside of the base in the lower wall has like a very powdery light gray transfer and that pretty clearly is ash. And so it looks like those are being set directly in the embers very often kind of sidled into the cooking fire from the side because they often just have one handle on one side and the sooting goes way up the opposite side. And so we're beginning to also be able to work out a little bit about how these different forms were used. There's much more we have to learn though from studying for example absorb residues and things like that which will allow one to answer that question a bit better. But I will also point out that we find this suite of forms in both ceramic and in sheet bronze. The latter is probably an upscale version of this. And I'll just point out that one of our grad students in classical archeology at Berkeley, Aaron Brown is even as I speak working on a PhD dissertation which is flowing out of this research at Pompeii where he's looking at the actual material culture of food preparation at Pompeii. So we can really do a much better job of posing and telling questions to this. Aaron's a very accomplished cook and connoisseur of food and cooking. And thus come up with better answers than I'm able to give you right now. Thanks. We have a question about the jewelry. How are such small objects such as jewelry, cameos, beads? How are they preserved and stored on site? Well, a lot of the finds that are perceived as being valuable, things made in silver and gold for example are, I can't go into much detail about this. I'm sure the people at Pompeii would not want me to default overly much. Those are stored under special secure arrangements, often in the Museo Archeologio Nazionale Annopoly, the big National Archeology Museum in Naples or in secure facilities on site. Other things that you might find, beads for example, or pendants in materials like glass paste or pheons, which we also find, or shell, are regarded as less prone to theft. And so those are stored in the regular storerooms together with materials and glass and bronze and pottery and animal bone and things like that. And do materials from Pompeii stay in Naples or in Italy or are they scattered around the world in many different museums? Well, in the 19th century when there's a lot of excavation going on in the area around Pompeii, sets of materials from farmhouses found their way to places like the Chicago Field Museum for example. But in the 20th century, one could not legally export things from archeological sites in Italy. And so, by and large, the lion's share of that material is now in Italy. The bulk of it will be stored in the National Archeological Museum in Naples or in what's now the Parque Archeological di Pompeii, the Archeological Park of Pompeii. That's what the site is now called, where there is now an antiquarium on site. They have a satellite antiquarium at Boscoreale, for example. And so, many of the objects will be stored and a very, very small subset of them will be displayed in those venues. And also, I should say, are frequently on short-term loan to museums all around the world in connection with particular exhibits that are organized in collaboration with the Archeological Park of Pompeii. So these materials do travel, but that they need to go back to the archeological superintendency of Pompeii. Okay, well, it looks like we're almost out of time here. Let me just put the last question to you. The seal ring doesn't look very ornamental. Would that have been worn every day? Oh, well, I don't know. I can claim how this was carried around. I wouldn't think that you'd be out walking around all the time with this on your finger. The sealing surface there is a few centimeters wide. It'd be very unwieldy. So I expect you might, if you were carrying it around, I suppose you might wear it on a lanyard or something like that and pick it up and use it. And this presumably is used for sealing in wax or plaster or clay or something like that to show your ownership of whatever is being sealed by that. This particular seal ring was found as an isolated find on the floor of the atrium of this house. Oh, no, actually that's from the other house. This one was actually found in a mass of objects being stored underneath the staircase in the atrium of this house. Romans like us understood that areas under staircases are kind of wasted space unless you have like Harry Potter living there. And they tended to take advantage of that for storage. This was found stored with a bunch of other stuff under the staircase. So my guess is, is it probably stayed put and you took it out when you needed it for some particular reason, would be my guess. Yeah, I imagine it'd be like a notary's stamp. Yeah, yeah. It's not like your passport. You're not carrying your passport around with you all the time, are you? Only when you particularly need it, right? So it's totally a guess. I don't really know, I don't know to what extent, for example, if you look at all of the nearly 2,000 deceased Romans that have been found in the area around Pompeii from the 87 on eruption, how many of them had on their person a seal rang. But on the other hand, they were high tailing it out of town with maybe their most precious objects. So even that might not be particularly indicative of what was normal usage. All right, well, thanks very much, Ted. It's been really interesting. Okay. And I wanna thank the listeners and viewers and people who sent in questions. And I wanna invite everyone to join us next Tuesday on June 7th at noon for a talk entitled, Unfinished Business, Completing a Long Forgotten Archeology Project in Afghanistan with Dr. Mitch Allen. So please join us then. Our speaker today, Ted Pena has agreed to field questions in the future. So if you feel free to post questions to the comments field of this video and we can direct them to Dr. Pena. And also we have a feedback form in the description of this video. So if you'd like to provide feedback about our series, please pull out that one. Thanks again, Ted. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for your time.