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Archaeological projects in Pompeii have moved from excavation to preservation. But there's still much we can learn from already unearthed finds.

Words by CHRISTINA STERBENZ

IN RECENT YEARS, excavations in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii have uncovered a 2,000-year-old laundromat, a bedroom used by slaves, and a fresco depicting an early iteration of pizza (minus the tomatoes—those wouldn’t come to Europe for at least another 10 centuries). None of those discoveries, however, stemmed from new digs into the roughly 20-foot layer of ash that encased the city after Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in A.D. 79. For decades, the Italian government had a moratorium on any additional excavations in Pompeii. That means most of the finds are by-products of efforts to preserve and restore what’s already been unearthed, according to Steven Ellis, a professor of Roman archaeology at the University of Cincinnati who worked on excavating Pompeii’s Porta Stabia neighborhood. “When they dug [the city] out, they created…

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National Geographic (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2024

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