YOOOO they found a fast food counter in Pompeii and it looks like it’s almost complete

This is so cool @jackdaw_writes https://twitter.com/perchetendenza/status/1342794216003555328

The reason Pompei is so amazing is because, unlike writings by high status senators and epic poems, it can give us incredible insights into what life was like in Roman times for the common man

Like the fact most people are lunch in these places, with cheap food and drinks

So the reason ther'es been a trickling of new stuff found in Pompei is because our national TV was filming a documentary in it

which I'm watching now

and it is REALLY good

there's an archaeobotanist talking about the reason they were putting fava beans in wine and archaeobotanist is one hell of a cool title

"We knew we hit jackpot when we smelled the wine, it was incredibly strong. Sometimes archaeology is a matter of knowing where to sniff."

"In ancient times, geese weren't fully domesticated yet. So they'd take geese eggs and have a chicken brood them, to try to make them more docile. Which is why this fresco has dead geese and live chickens." holy shit

"Ah, this graffiti says "Nicia cacator" and a word meaning 'pervert', meaning something akin to Nicia the pervert shitter. Someone didn't like one of the workers."

god insulting people peaked in ancient Rome, it's all downhill from there

really crazy to see just how normal and part of everyday life sex work was in ancient times, every place had its naked figures on the walls and dedicated rooms

then you remember sex work was criminalized in Italy in 1958 by Christian Democracy

yaaaay

Pompei is the wet dream of every single Italian archeologist because look at this

We still haven't excavated most of it, let alone classified everything

Now a volcanologist is showing how to date how long it took to bury the city in pyroclastic flow based on rock layers

So what they do when they find a body is they stop everything, drill a small hole and drop in a camera – bodies decompose and only leave a skeleton behind in a person-shaped hole. They "fish" what little material is left from the hole then pour hardening liquid in it

They basically use the "shape" left by the body as a mold! This way they get a literal snapshot of the moment of death, which is... incredibly harrowing holy shit

cw

Then the body is shipped off for analysis, which thanks to the absolutely incredible conditions can be incredibly informative. For example they found out that this 40yo man was fleeing the city AFTER it was covered by smoldering rocks

Jesus Christ this documentary is horrifying

He had a leather bag full of coins with him – but it was about the equivalent of 700€. Was that all he could salvage? Did he steal it from a shop? Was he the shop owner? We may never know.

Then anger. There's been tomb raiders ever since Pompei was discovered – here a very disappointed archaeologist is showing a hole she estimates was made during the Napoleonic period. The house has been robbed blind already.

Days of work wasted, but the diggers move on.

Now a house where all pottery and silverware was moved to a single room. Why? Nobody really knows. Speculations include possible renovation works.

A scale is found in what might be the house of a perfume maker.

"Ladies... look at how beautiful this is" the archaeologist says, with a face lighting up brighter than the Mediterranean sun, and I want to cry.

god the direction in this documentary is SO GOOD

directing, maybe, shut up i'm excited

like look at this stuff. no touch ups, nothing done to it yet, and it's still looking so bright and colorful

They found this portrait of a woman and GOD this production design is SO GOOD

An archaeologist kneels. "See, on this wall. A very inexperienced hand scribbled an A and a B, and you can see the start of a C. Look at the height. Someone was practicing."

My heart

"See, this right here. LEPORIS FELLAS. Leporis is a name, fellas is a verb – it describe the practice of oral... You get it. It's a female name, probably Sicilian in origin. Someone was playing a prank."

loooooooooool

Piero Angela sheds a tear here, this is superb stuff. All the actors are talking in Latin, it has closeups and special effects, but also shots like these where it shows you the full room to give you a sense of the entire space instead of going for a more Hollywood angle

holy shit

they find a chimaera and the director of the archaeological park gets emotional

"I am disoriented. Mosaics like these have no equals anywhere else in Pompei."

Cut to France, where he's at a bibliotheque to look for similar iconography in old books. I love how it shows that archaeology isn't just digging stuff up but also the extremely complex process of figuring out WHAT you just dug up

They figured out that a reason why some stuff didn't make sense is that there were renovation works being done on the road

And they found a room that was used to store materials, with A DATE ON THE WALL

16 days before the calendae of November – meaning the 17th of October

It's absurdly hard to figure out in what century something was made, let alone HAVING THE EXACT DATE WRITTEN ON IT

PILLOW FIGHT

The date is interesting because it seems to contradict what Plinium wrote in his books, which are the only ancient Roman account of what happened in Pompei and date it to the 24th of August. They suspect mistakes in copying as it was handed down across thousands of years

(daily reminder that history, especially ancient history, is not in fact written in stone – a lot of it relies on what little information someone decided to write down and we constantly find evidence that allows us to be more precise about it)

Gotta point out how absolutely on point this documentary is with its language

They never say "we found a body", they say "we found a victim". These were real people, not a roadside attraction. It's incredibly respectful and, surprisingly, it's not about making it a spectacle

"Okay, so... not much left of the skeleton. Still, female, young, can tell that much. Check the teeth, there's a wisdom tooth here that...

No. Not a wisdom tooth. A normal tooth, still coming out.

This was a child. A young child."

i'm gonna cry

They show researchers debating what exactly happened to each house, figuring out what was caused by graverobbers, what was caused by the eruption, what was already odd, what was caused by people fleeing in a panic AND WHY DO ARCHAEOLOGISTS LOOK SO COOL IT'S UNFAIR

"This is not a necropolis, I'm not looking at a group of people that were... selected, so to speak, dead and buried. It feels weird to say that, but these people were alive, and that must be considered."

"Albucius, one of the candidates for the upcoming elections, seems to be the one who covered this entire alley with his name. Writing your name on a private wall was considered extremely rude, so it was usually done at night."

man, the more things change huh

"We know that political campaigns were often financed by corporations, or private citizens supporting their candidates."

MAN, THE MORE THINGS CHANGE HUH

jesus christ look at this aaaaaagh

so it was common practice to write things on walls inside people's houses

which rude? but only to us in the twenty first century. at the time it was just... something people did. they left a trace of their passage.