I grew up with John Romer's history programs back in the days when you could actually learn something on The Learning Channel. This is first book of Romer's I have read. As part of my on-going series, I wanted to see how the (re)discovery of Pompeii fit into his narrative of the development of archaeology as a science. The books is subtitled; “Great Excavations of the World.” I hoped it would be a chronological, example by example look at how archaeological techniques and knowledge were developed. The book is organized more topically and focuses mostly on the Nineteenth Century. It was an enjoyable read, but I don't know that it was all that informative and certainly not a very important work in the field. It felt very much like the companion book to a television show, which of course, it is.
The broad topics Romer covers are: Hey! There's old Stuff in the Ground. Hey! There's treasure in the Ground. Stuff in the Ground Proves the Truth of Literature. Which Culture is Really the Oldest? Stuff in the Ground Proves the Rightness of My Politics. In each of these categories, Romer gives ten to fifteen examples of the development of knowledge or, more commonly, competing interpretations of the same information. This back-and-forth, vignette approach gives an over-all impression of the professionalization of archaeology and the contributions the field has made to human knowledge. This “general impression” result of the book is not exactly a bad thing, but I hoped the text would be more precise. Combined with Romer's very personal writing style, most of the book ends up being an assortment of report about what John Romer thinks about various things, not a coherent, supported presentation of history. For me, that holds the book back.
Many familiar figures are covered; Elgin in Greece, Belzoni in Egypt, Schliemann in Turkey, Petrie in Greece, Evans in Crete and Carter in Egypt. The book also introduced me to others I didn't know; Pitt Rivers (who invented methods of diagramming a site's layers which are still used today), Auguste Mariette (who championed keeping Egypt's history in Egypt), John Stevens and Frederick Catherwood (who followed local guides into the jungle to make the first detailed reports of “lost” Maya cities), and James Breasted who (secured massive corporate sponsorship to conduct extensive surveys of Middle-Eastern sites).
So, what does this book have to say about Pompeii? There are three short sections at the beginning which use Herculaneum and Pompeii as jumping-off points to the themes of the book. In 1980, the docks at Herculaneum where excavated which revealed the actual people who had fled from the volcano is 79 CE. The most striking image being the skeleton of a slave woman clutching the child of her wealthy owners. The interest in the people and the echoes of the society in which they lived was the primary motivation of the excavation. How far from where archaeology started. Back in 1736 when excavations first began in earnest, Herculaneum was just a source of decorations. No one considered what could be learned about Roman life from the remains. Even after Pompeii was uncovered and scholars could see the reality of the world described in the surviving Roman literature they treated Pompeii as more of a blank slate onto which they painted their impressions of the past than as a new source of information. Romer doesn't quite make it explicit, but it seems to me his book is an explanation of how we got from Herculaneum in 1736 to Herculaneum in 1980.
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