Archeologists uncovering Pompeii from before Roman rule

By Daniel Williams, The Washington Post



POMPEII, Italy -- For Pompeii's 2 million yearly visitors, the overwhelming attraction is the captivating view of daily life in the Roman Empire evoked by the city's temples, taverns, houses and public baths, and ever-popular brothels with their erotic frescoes.

They might fail to notice the newly dug trenches at the city's southwest exit that nevertheless provide a glimpse of a fact obscured by Pompeii's better-known association with the imperial era: A non-Roman civilization thrived here for three centuries, with its own temples, houses, baths and saucy sexual practices.

Last month, archaeologists from Italy's Basilicata University uncovered the remains of a structure built by the Samnites, a mountain warrior people who conquered and ruled Pompeii before Roman chariots wheeled into town. Looking for the remains of Pompeii's harbor, researchers instead found a pre-Roman temple wall, clay offerings to the Samnite goddess of love, and a basin and terra cotta pipes indicating the site of a ritual bath.

They were digging below Pompeii's surface because the focus of excavations here has changed. For 250 years, most excavation concentrated on the city that was suspended in ash and stone by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Until the 1990s, local officials believed constant discoveries from the Roman era were needed to preserve Pompeii's position as Italy's most popular tourist attraction.

But current administrators say this approach has become counterproductive, noting they can barely afford to maintain the scores of monuments already exposed. Only 34 acres of Pompeii's excavated 115 acres are open to visitors, half the expanse on view 50 years ago. Tourists take pieces of marble for souvenirs, and thieves frequently raid the sites. In 30 years more than 600 items have been pilfered from Pompeii. One of the worst thefts occurred in 1977, when someone hacked 14 frescoes from a villa known as the House of the Gladiators. And in January, thieves cut two frescoes from the House of the Chaste Lovers.

Pompeii's archaeological superintendent, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, decreed an end to the expansion of digs outward.

"By searching vertically, one uncovers the full history of the city. The surface Roman part is only part of the story," Guzzo said in a recent interview. Too, "going deep doesn't cost so much. It won't include restoration or opening more area to tourism or hiring more guards."

Subterranean Pompeii may not contain the luxurious villas and elegant sculptures found on the surface, but for archaeologists trained to perceive a universe in a clay shard, it is no less exciting.

"Pompeii is a city which, unluckily for it but fortunately for us, is best known for being destroyed. In everyone's mind, it is frozen at the moment of destruction, when it was a Roman city," said Emmanuele Curti, chief archaeologist on the latest dig. "But Pompeii was a city long before that, and it's good to remind the world of that."

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I still think it was a horrible way to go

How interesting!!! I never knew there was another civilisation before the romans one at pompeii!!! You learn something everyday!!! I would love to go there and look at the ruins but it loks like what you can see is getting cut down more and more because of the bad elements of society!!! We need to preserve these sites and protect them so we can embrace and learn from our past!!!