Senior Ana María Núñez shares her study abroad experience digging into antiquity at the site of a famous volcanic eruption.
Last summer, Ana María Núñez went on a five-week archaeological trip to southern Italy, near Naples. She worked at the dig site Insula 14, a house in Pompeii that was covered by ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted. As a student excavator, she was assigned to a garden trench area, where she spent time learning about the workings of an archeological site.
What happened at Pompeii, and how has it been excavated over the years?
In the year 79 CE, the volcano Vesuvius erupted near the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Herculaneum was covered with a pyroclastic flow and Pompeii was completely encased in ash, so the two towns were both well-preserved in very different ways.
Throughout history, people continued to live near (and on) the city of Pompeii. By the 20th century, people started doing modern archeology there. Now, two-thirds of the ash around Pompeii has been fully removed, and the town has been excavated down to the 79 CE level.
Some of the current scholarship in Pompeii focuses on digging below the 79 CE level to understand what was going on in a Roman city before the eruption, and that’s the stage of the site I worked on. The site of Insula 14 has long been thought to be a brothel because two mirrors were found there during early excavation. However, the archeologist overseeing that site, Allison Emmerson, an associate professor at Tulane University, doesn’t necessarily believe that. As student excavators, part of our job was to look for clues that could help us further understand the site’s history.