Ancient Pompeii Research Articles

Holocene Coastal Environments near Pompeii before the A.D. 79 Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Italy

Studies of some 70 bore holes around ancient Pompeii, on the southwestern slope of the Somma-Vesuvius volcano, allow the reconstruction of Holocene environments earlier than the A.D. 79 eruption. This eruption produced about 10 km3 of pyroclastic material that buried the Roman cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae and promoted a shoreline progradation of 1 km. The Sarno coastal plain, in a post-Miocene sedimentary basin, has been affected by Somma-Vesuvius volcanic activity since the late Pleistocene. At the Holocene transgressive maximum, the sea reached an area east of ancient Pompeii and formed a beach ridge (Messigno, 5600 and 4500 14C yr B.P.) more than 2 km inland from the present shore. Progradation of the plain due to high volcanic supply during the following highstand resulted in a new beach ridge (Bottaro-Pioppaino, 3600 14C yr B.P.) 0.5 km seaward of the Messigno ridge. Ancient Pompeii was built as the shoreline continued to prograde toward its present position. Deposits of the A.D. 79 eruption blanketed the natural levees of the Sarno River, marshes near the city and on the Sarno's floodplain, the morphological highs of Messigno and Bottaro-Pioppaino beach ridges, and the seashore. That shore was probably 1 km landward of the present one.

Ａ．Ｄ．７９年のベスビオ火山噴火と古代ポンペイ都市の壊滅

Ａ．Ｄ．７９年のベスビオ火山噴火と古代ポンペイ都市の壊滅

Geologists working to mitigate Mount Rainier hazard

Someday the modern metropolitan Seattle‐Tacoma area may wake up to find itself a lot like ancient Pompeii—buried in a tomb of pyroclastic ash. But area inhabitants, even in the worst of possible eruption scenarios, will likely fare better than Pompeiians, thanks to an effort by Earth scientists, policy makers, civil authorities, and the like to get ahead of the volcanic hazard curve, tells Richard S. Fiske, a Smithsonian Institution geologist, who chaired a National Research Council (NRC) study released last week on Washington's Mount Rainier.

New England Unitarianism in Fictional Antiquity: The Romances of William Ware

N EW England Unitarianism of the 183o's may seem as far from romantic historical fiction as nineteenth-century Boston from ancient Palmyra or Rome. But one currently underrated American novelist brought them together with surprising success. William Ware in his once famous but now nearly forgotten novels-Zenobia, Aurelian, and Julian-effectively blended accurate historical description of the ancient world with vigorous expression of the new social and religious ideas of the Boston Unitarians. Antique romance became a potent vehicle for liberal opinion. When Ware's first novel appeared in 1837, such discussion of contemporary political and philosophical problems through the medium of fiction set in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, or Judaea was by no means new. From its beginnings in France in Fenelon's TMldmaque (1699) and Barthilemy's Anacharsis (1788), the romance of antiquity had had a tradition of contemporary relevance. Only a few years before Ware's work, for instance, John Gibson Lockhart had advanced modem religious and political ideas in Valerius (1821), Fanny Wright in A Few Days in Athens (1822), and Walter Savage Landor in Pericles and Aspasia (1836). In America, Thomas Gray had already published in Boston his highly didactic The Vestal (1830) set in ancient Pompeii, and Lydia Maria Child her philosophic romance Philothea (1836) set in ancient Greece. What places Ware apart from the general tradition, however, is the specificness and cogency with which he presents in antique clothes his obviously modern New England Unitarian doctrines and social opinions. Son of one Unitarian clergyman and controversialist, brother of another, uncle of a third, member of an extraordinarily able Massachusetts family, by no accident William Ware

Large Vineyard Discovered in Ancient Pompeii

Large Vineyard Discovered in Ancient Pompeii

Social Analysis of Graffiti

GRAFFITI, AS AN ASPECT OF CULTURE, can be used as an unobtrusive measure to reveal patterns of customs and attitudes of a society. Observing graffiti will reveal changes in customs and attitudes. Through studying graffiti, Lindsay was able to reconstruct much about life in ancient Pompeii.2 To date, many projects have used the thematic content of graffiti to posit certain motivational hypotheses about the individuals and the societal attitudes that produced it, but few studies have approached graffiti by problem testing. There have been no diachronic studies devoted to problem testing. This article is a midway report of a longitudinal study testing three problems that were formulated in earlier studies. LITERATURE ON SOCIAL ATTITUDES. Lomas and Weltman conducted in 1966 a cross-sectional study of graffiti in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.3 Correlating the type of graffiti, for instance, outdoors as opposed to indoors, and the thematic content with the class and ethnic composition of the community in which the graffiti were written, they concluded that graffiti reflect shared attitudes and values as well as ethnocentric variations on main cultural themes.4 Sechrest