Dr. Estelle Lazer

So today I'm talking with Associate Professor Dzung Vu, who is the anatomist and radiologist on the Pompeii Cast Project. So can you tell us a little bit about your role on the Cast Project?

Associate Professor Dzung Vu

Yeah, well I'm not a radiologist but I've been working in anatomy for so long, since 1972 actually, and my interest is radiology, so much so that I am one of the trainers and examiners for the College of Radiologists in Australia. And so that advantage is that I am used to looking at radiology and X-Rays and CT scans, and that helps with my background in anatomy. What we need in this case is more anatomy than radiology, but radiology is a means then to an end of seeing the structure of the bones of the cast. And the background of radiology helps me understand the artifacts, what is not because we are not having the optimal angle, optimal conditions to have a good CT scan or X-Ray, but it just make do.

And for example, if you have a cast that is in contorted position, dug out from the ground, and we have to use an angle that, well, sometimes you cannot even put the plate and the tube in proper angle. And so you have to have some experience in that. And my anatomical background helps that, because radiologists, a pure radiologist may not be as good and a pure anatomist will not be as good, so that is why I'm happy to join the project and contribute what I can. And I love it, because anatomy is only a background, the means and end [inaudible 00:02:00] of radiology. But now it is good use in this case.

Dr. Lazer

And your brother, who is a radiologist, Manh Vu, he also contributes to the project. What is the advantage of having two eyes looking at the X-Rays and CT scans?

Associate Professor Vu

Yeah, of course two heads are better than one. And we compliment each other, because as I said before, suboptimal condition for X-Ray, and my brother brings in his experience in radiology. But sometimes we have to discuss and we throw ideas back and forth, no, it may not be like that because, the angle is almost tangential to the tibial tuberosity, for example, a lump in front of the tibia.

And so therefore they have, you normally don't see that. Because we don't use that shot in patient for example. And that's why I'm very happy with having my brother and radiologist. We sit down and we've done that before. We have a group of dentists and you yourself an archeologist and my brother and I, and it's amazing to have the contribution from four different people. Now, when you have something on the skull for example, then we have to ask Alain for his experience as a dentist. And

that is why the mandible, the jaw bone looks funny like that. And so they, it's all interlinked.

Dr. Lazer

It's true, it works, I mean, as a team I think we work really well together and certainly I think our different experience and expertise together makes a really formidable team. We can see things between us that no individual would probably be able to work out.

Associate Professor Vu

Yeah it does help. And my background in surgery and orthopedic surgery, and it's perfect for this because bone, hard tissue and it does help because sometimes, for example the cast that ran from the fugitive that ran away from in Naples for example, they're not normal and then they're caught out when running on the beach. And so in that case a little bit of experience in surgery helps.

Dr. Lazer

And what about the problem of the plaster? I mean that's something you wouldn't have experienced before. So we are trying to get readable X-Rays and CT scans through thick plaster. It puts a lot of artifacts into the images, doesn't it? And sometimes we just don't get an image at all because the plasters too thick.

Associate Professor Vu

That's right. And depending on the material that they use to make the cast as well. And ideally, and if you could have my brother or I there the moment you take the X-Ray or to do the CT scan and because we look at the X-Ray and the CT scan and we've done that with the X-Ray machine, portable X-Ray machine. I said now if you change the angle a little bit from above, then it looks better.

Dr. Lazer

And just to explain, why is the angle so important? So, I guess the question is what actually does an X-Ray do that makes the angle so important?

Associate Professor Vu

Well, the very simple example, you put your fist in between the light and the wall. Then you turn your fist around, you have a different shadow altogether. And then that is why we are looking at the three-dimensional object on a 2D shadow. That's what it is. And so for example, you put the hand in front of that and a flat hand and if you look at a sideways, you only see a straight black shadow and we turn a little bit, then you can see, okay, this person doesn't have the little finger. We didn't see it until we have the right angle. So that is why it is so important and we are lucky to be able to get a portable X-Ray machine so you can choose the optimal view right there.

Dr. Lazer

Thank you. That's fantastic. Thank you so much.

[end of transcript]

Dr. Estelle Lazer

I'm talking to Associate Professor Dzung Vu who's the anatomist and radiologist on the Pompeii Cast Project. The first thing I guess that's very important to understand is what actually is an x-ray? What are we looking at when we look at an x-ray?

Associate Professor Dzung Vu

Well, x-ray was discovered accidentally when Röntgen put his hand between the cathode ray tube and the film. The x-ray goes through the flesh, the soft tissue, much more easily than going through the bone and so we have shadow of different density and when you have air only, there's no blockage of x-ray at all. It's have black. Then we have soft tissue like flesh, muscle, it's gray and the world is white. If you have a little bit whiter, but if you have a nail in the bone, for example from previous surgery, then it's absolutely white because metal blocks it completely. That's the idea of x-ray.

There are two things about x-ray. Number one, you have to have the contrast between the bone that you look at and the surrounding structures. Let's say you have the hand, then the x-ray will go through the flesh very easily. The bone stands out very nicely. You adjust the intensity of the x-ray, then you can have the flesh almost completely black, and then the bone stands up more. It's a play between the relative strength of penetration. Now on the cast for example, then you have sometimes glasses, sometimes cements around the bone. That makes it much harder and that's why it's ideal if you have an x-ray then it should have a certain intensity through that and say, no, the contrast is not too, let's crank up the intensity a bit more and then, well the surrounding cement will be a bit more grayer or darker. Then he can see the bones that he had more.

Dr. Lazer

So essentially when we look at x-rays, we are looking at shadows. Is that correct?

Associate Professor Vu

It is exactly the shadow, yeah. We just look at the shadow and that is why it's hard because, and as you put your hand in front of the wall and you can make an animal out of it. I can have a straight line of five fingers clearly shown. An experienced radiologist can see that from the angle we expect to see this. I have the advantage of being anatomist as well and surgeon so my experience in dissecting and I've looked at the real bone and tissue from different angles all my career. From that only one step to radiology.

Dr. Lazer

But quite difficult isn't it when we are trying to see things through thick plasters. Sometimes the plaster's so dense, we don't get an image at all that we can distinguish.

Associate Professor Vu

That's right. And that's why CT is better. CT, you have basically the x-ray spinning through it and then you can choose any angle you like.

Dr. Lazer

But unfortunately we can't CT scan all of our cusps because some of them are embedded in the volcanic material and so we opportunistically x-ray them and some of the plaster's so dense we get no image at all. Like you said, when we're going through lime cement, we're not really seeing anything.

Associate Professor Vu

Well it was precious to see these you've had on some specimens, but some of them are too big to go through the gamma field of the machine anyway, and to bring the machine in is a very costly exercise.

Dr. Lazer

Hugely expensive. Also, what we found is that we could get a 16 sliced CT scanner on site, but to get a better machine that gives us more slices we had to go to the local hospital, but then the gantry width, so when you put it on the bed on the platform to take it through, there's only an opening of 70 centimetres and a lot of the victims died, well, they ended out in positions that just won't go through a 70 centimetre opening. So that's another limitation. Some of them are just too fragile to move. We're limited by those circumstances.

The other thing that's really important for the project is that we work as a team and that we each providing different expertise, but we do also use your brother who's Associate Professor Manfu, who's also a radiologist. What is the advantage of having two radiologists on the team?

Associate Professor Vu

I'm a surgeon anatomist and an amateur radiologist because in my practice I looked at especially bones and orthopedic surgeon. But it is important because my brother man, Man, radiologist, he has more experience with different incidents, angle and he read the contrast better than I. That is why even at the beginning before he really actively joined the team, I often send images to him and discuss on the phone. It's amazing to get some insight from an expert in that area as well.

Dr. Lazer

So the more sets of eyes, the better?

Associate Professor Vu

Oh, yes and always because we are doing something that we are not trained basically because well, he'd never seen, never in his training, seen a bone in cement.

Dr. Lazer

Also, we have these people have been dead for a very long time and we have a lot of postmortem damage and so there's a lot of postmortem fractures so you need experience to be able to distinguish between what happens at or around the time of death and what happens a long time after death. We can assess what's happened a long time before death because there's usually some healing process. But what happens when you die at that moment of death and afterwards the difference is whether the bone's wet or not. And so being able to read that is very important as well.

Associate Professor Vu

That's right. Sometimes it's hard to tell and it could be postmortem happening as well. The cast was broken and say in that case a real sighting of the cast helped as well.

Dr. Lazer

It's very important that we do our field work in situ, isn't it?

Associate Professor Vu

Yeah.

Dr. Lazer

Thank you very much.

Associate Professor Vu

My pleasure.

[end of transcript]

Dr. Estelle Lazer

Talking again with Dr. Alain Middleton, our forensic dentist on our project. Certainly, the main reason that Alain became part of the team was because of his phenomenal experience in identifying individuals from their teeth. But what's become equally important is his knowledge of plaster. As a clinical dentist, Alain has worked very extensively with plaster and understanding how these casts have been achieved has become a very important part of the project. Over to you, Alain.

Dr. Alain Middleton

Interestingly, when we started dentistry, we spent a lot of time studying the properties of plaster. At the time, I must have often thought back to is this a throwback to kindergarten days and plasticine perhaps, or was the relevance of this material disproportionate to the amount of time that we were spending discussing the properties of plaster?Plaster has a number of properties. The size of the particle of the plaster powder is significant in terms of the detail surface of the set plaster and also the hardness of the plaster. The ratio of water to the powder is extremely important. Every manufacturer of plaster, at whatever level that plaster is made to be used at, will have very precise mixing ratios of water to the powder as well as the mixing time. This, in turn, will control the setting time.

The other thing, too, is that the moment you start pouring the plaster, the plaster is contacting a surface that may be porous, as in the casts from Pompeii, or it may be a less porous material such as, say, a rubber form work. This will have some influence on how much of the liquid component of the plaster mix is to be absorbed by the surrounding margins of the space we're trying to get the impression or the mold from. In a rubber mold, there'll be very little loss of liquid so the plaster quality will remain fairly constant over the time of the poor. Whereas, in something where you're pouring up against a porous surface that will absorb the liquid rapidly, the properties of the plaster, it's flowability and the rate at which it sets and the final finish on the surface will vary considerably. It's not as important in a plaster cast of an individual as if you are making a denture to fit against a mold of someone's teeth.

The other problems that you have with pouring plaster is the introduction of air into the setting plaster. Anybody that's ever made chocolate will know that it's very hard to avoid getting air bubbles into your chocolate. You have to do various things like shaking and vibrating the mold that the chocolate is being poured into to get rid of as much of that air bubbles or trapped air as possible. Now, obviously with pouring a cast in Pompeii, we can't shake and rattle the area that we are pouring the material into.

As well as the air bubbles, as the front of the poured plaster moves through the mold, it is pushing ahead the air that was there prior to the plaster being poured in there. Now, in pouring into an open topped area, the air can escape upwards very easily. However, if you are pouring into a fine detailed space that has irregular areas, the risk of getting air trapped or locked at the ends of those porosities that you're pouring plaster into will result in possible airlocks where the plaster can't go because

the pressure of the air that's backed up stops the plaster flowing and, therefore, you don't get any impression of the details that you're trying to pour the plaster into because the plaster just doesn't get there.

[end of transcript]

Dr. Estelle Lazer

So, we're talking to Dr. Alain Middleton, the forensic dentist on the project and one of the most important tasks he has, apart from looking at the dentition of the cast, which is essential to identify individuals, he's also studying the cluster, because we need to understand how these casts were achieved. And definitely they weren't documented very well, it's very difficult to interpret what we have if we don't understand how the plaster casts were made.

Dr. Alain Middleton

So once the plaster has been poured into the body cavity and been allowed to set, then the overburden or materials surrounding the body is meticulously removed, and ideally we end up with a plaster surface with the detail that was in the overburden that has now been removed. This is often the detail of the type of clothing, the position of the folds in the clothing, et cetera. And also, of course, the facial features of the individual, as well as their general body features. What we found when we radiographed the cast, it is apparent that the plaster is poured in a number of layers or stratums and there is often a considerable difference from one stratum to the next in the way the plaster has set, which indicates that the way the plaster was mixed initially and the pour are not consistent from one pouring session to the next pouring session. This will impact significantly on the detail of the surfaces of the material, because the plaster has set at different rates and with different qualities of mix to start with.

Dr. Lazer

So obviously you have a lot of experience as a clinical dentist in dealing with plaster and your understanding of the nature of it and how it sets is very important to our understanding of the casts. So, can you tell us a little bit about that and what impact that might have on what we see ultimately?

Dr. Middleton

So, when we're pouring the plaster, we are dealing with air surrounding the space we're pouring the plaster into. And we have air in two forms, there will be bubbles within the plaster of air that will create voids and loss of detail in the areas where the air is, and we will have areas where air ahead of the poured plaster is unable to escape quickly enough to allow the plaster to flow into or to fully flow into the space where the air was. And those airlocks will create missing areas of detail when the overburden has been chipped away. The air bubbles within the plaster, normally you would in, say a dental environment or if you're pouring chocolate, very similar sort of situation, you will shake or tilt or vibrate the setting material to get rid of as many of those bubbles as possible. This is not possible when you are pouring into a body cavity that's attached to mother earth. So we have to be very meticulous in pouring

as slowly as possible so that we minimize the introduction of air into the poured plaster and also to allow the air ahead of the advancing plaster front to dissipate into the surrounding overburden and allow the plaster before it becomes too viscous to flow completely into the spaces that we want to get the detail.

[end of transcript]

Dr. Estelle Lazer

Dr. Alain Middleton is the forensic dentist on the Pompeii Cast Project, and his job is to establish the dental health of the individuals that we're studying, and also to get some insights into what the character of the population of victims was. So what range of ages do we have and what is their essential dental health, and is it anything like what we've been led to believe from the popular press?

Dr. Alain Middleton

Well, I think one of the first things that we noticed observing the first few examples of dentition that we had made available to us, was the fact that the myth of the perfect Mediterranean diet and teeth was, in fact, a total myth. Most of the mouths would have been very unpleasant mouths to own in terms of pain, and our friends and loved ones would have found that the odors coming from our mouth due to dental diseases of various forms would have been quite offensive. It was quite obvious in the random sampling that we have made available to us that cavities are well and truly present in most of the mouths. Some mouths, as in a normal population, would have no caries, no cavities, but most of them had broken down teeth in one form or another. Also, what was quite evident and almost alarming was the fact that there were quite often evidence of injuries to the jawbones that had not received any treatment, probably because no treatment was available.

We're also able to look at environmental factors, such as wear and tear on the teeth, which will often give us an indication of age, as well as the type of diet that the individual was consuming. Aging of teeth, particularly in juvenile populations, can be relatively accurate. Adult aging becomes less accurate, and we are then dependent on environmental factors to give us a better idea of the age. One of the other areas of interest is periodontal disease, which is the result of bad gum disease in life, and the severity of that gum disease is reflected in the amount of bone that is lost in the areas around the teeth. This naturally increases with age, but what was also evident was that it was quite marked in what would normally be considered relatively young people by today's standards, the amount of decay and also of root and nerve exposures, indicating that there would have been an element of pain associated with these untreated lesions was not insignificant, and that dental hygiene was nonexistent.

[end of transcript]

Dr. Estelle Lazer

I'm just having a discussion with my co-director on The Pompeii Cast Project, Associate Professor Kathryn Welch. I'm Estelle Lazer. So, Kathryn, what is the role of the historian in the project and what is your role in particular?

Associate Professor Kathryn Welch

Well, let's start with my role because I think there are two parts to my role. One, because I work here at the University of Sydney and I have a fair degree of institutional capacity. I do a lot of the organization. So that will entail sometimes working, applying for grants so that we can undertake our work, looking after the money, looking after the paperwork that needs to be filled out with the university when we do permissions. I'm very, very heavily involved in applying for the memorandum of agreement because there are just some things that I can do here on the ground at the university and also to make sure that you, Estelle, continue to be a part of our operation here as our colleague and that the university can support the project. So, I kind of operate as a liaison person in all those respects, which is a great honor and pleasure for me to do.

But in my day job, when I'm not assisting with The Pompeii Cast Project, I am a Roman historian and I guess my special fields are Republican Roman history. And I don't worry about saying that particularly. Republican Roman political history is what I would spend a lot of my time doing. So I work on guys like Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and also the women of the time and this sort of thing. And of course, since I guess the beginning of the 2000s, beginning of this century, you know can say that now it's 20 years in, I've developed a big teaching interest in the Roman landscape and the history of the city of Rome. And that also enables me to bring something very special to the project.

Dr. Lazer

And so, how much can Pompeii teach us about life in Roman Italy?

Associate Professor Welch

Well, this is a very interesting question. So Rome, it's a huge metropolis at its heyday, a city of around a million people. And then from Rome, we get the idea of Roman, which of course, are other centers, first in Italy and then around the Mediterranean, across the Mediterranean, reaching well across into modern-day Turkey, modern-day Syria and the Levant, Egypt, spreading the kind of architecture and sometimes aspects of political organization, city life that we will call Roman.

Now, they weren't entirely Roman. Nothing is entirely Roman. Rome is Rome. But they reflect the fact that Rome was the imperial power for so many centuries. Italy itself, Roman Italy, is a big field of study in its own right, not just Pompeii, the many

myriad of cities that grew up through the peninsula that had their own histories before Rome came along. Rome tends to amalgamate them under through a series of individual treaties and arrangements. So they all eventually seem to have come under Roman sway and have their organization, their town, their cities, their landscapes all changed by the experience of their relationship with Rome.

And Pompeii, of course, famously comes directly under Roman power in 80, but had been profoundly affected by Rome even before then. And I guess too, you've got an Italian culture that was there even for Rome to tap into. So this is a bit of a two-way street as to what might have been before, what happens with Roman domination. And then we get this city of Pompeii, which is an amazing archeological site for us, isn't it? It's perhaps the best, would you say? I know Estelle's got a big soft spot for it. But from the amount of information we can find out from it, it's pretty spectacular. Is it not?

Dr. Lazer

The Vesuvian sites, they're unique because of the way that they were preserved. We have just this phenomenal wealth of information that there is no parallel for in any other site. So they've tended to become a model for Rome in general. And maybe people forget that they weren't Rome. And I think that's something that we have to keep in mind when we are studying them, that they were not really very important in the time that they were occupied and they're much more important to us now as we look back. But in antiquity, they were so unimportant that when Pliny the Younger was writing about the eruption, he didn't mention them by name.

Associate Professor Welch

He doesn't even mention them. What would you have said was roughly speaking, and these are all rubbery figures, but roughly speaking, what do you think the people think that the population of Pompeii and Herculaneum was at the time of their destruction?

Dr. Lazer

We honestly don't know and the variation in estimates tells us how much we don't know. So I think the numbers vary. I think the very lowest are below 8,000, 6,000 and something, right up to 36,000. And I've been to conferences where the results are discussed. We just don't have sufficient evidence.

Associate Professor Welch

But still, at the maximum, you're looking at a figure of under 40,000.

Dr. Lazer

Oh, definitely. And a lot of scholars would sort of split the difference and say about 15,000, but really, really we don't know. But it's not like a vast number. It's not a big metropolis.

Associate Professor Welch

And Herculaneum, we don't know the extent of it perhaps, but even smaller?

Dr. Lazer

Well, most people suggest that the number was between four and a half and 5,000. But again, we don't know for sure.

Associate Professor Welch

All of these demographics are very, very hard to ascertain. But even if we just take it on a proportional level, the Roman demographers, those trying to work out exactly the same thing, the population in the city of Rome, would go as low as 800,000 and they'd go up to a million and a half for around at the same time. So-

Dr. Lazer

Gives you a scale.

Associate Professor Welch

... immediately you get ... We will never know the exact figures. It's just impossible to know them. All ancient figures are worrying, but that difference in scale allows alone. And if you just think about the sort of infrastructure that Rome requires to provide life even in its most basic form for the citizens. So, how many aqueducts does Pompeii have? One?

Dr. Lazer

Mm-hmm.

Associate Professor Welch

Rome has, I think, I can't remember the exact figure, but it's upwards of 10 and then it keeps growing. And then those aqueducts had to be serviced by armies of trained slaves who managed them, kept them going, make sure that if there was a leak somewhere it was fixed and made sure ... Even the building of them, the science that went into them, was so much more majestic and magnificent. Those long arcades that you think of when you think of as aqueducts in fact, are a very small proportion of how an aqueduct worked. They were when you didn't have an alternative because they were the most expensive thing to build. You normally tried to use the terrain to get that gradient so that the water would flow. And you've got aqueducts ...

If you go down to Porta Maggiore, there's something like five aqueducts meet at that point and then go off into different parts of the city in this miraculously complex way. And so even that alone, just think about the size of the population, the need for water. Getting food to that population was an absolutely meticulous task and it came under the banner of various politicians in the late republic, but under the empire with emperors, it was one of the emperor's key duties.

You think it's all about war and all the rest of it. It was not. One of the most important things the emperor had to do was get grain into Rome and store it. Some of it was given away free to the citizens and some of it was sold, but just feeding the population was a massive, massive infrastructure job. And so the contrast between the two cities, from my point of view is remarkable. Everything you meet in Rome, you meet in Pompeii in a kind of shrunk down, observable and recognizable form, but it's just on steroids when you go off the road to Latin and Rome.

Dr. Lazer

Yeah, it's true. So, do you think that we can extrapolate, say housing from what we see in Pompeii?

Associate Professor Welch

I think people have done. Let's start with some of the things that we are pretty sure we can. And I think food. Now of course, there will always be regional differences in food because as most ancient populations went with what was local and the fields of Campania were very, very rich. Actually though, it wasn't that hard to get food that wasn't too perishable up the road from Campania to Rome, and we know that that could happen. We also know that the Romans had a lot of villas down in this area. So there's traffic between the two areas all the time, all the time, I think in every season, but particularly the summer months and the nicer weather that you'd get people going up and down. And we know that there are close personal relationships. But I think what you can say with housing is it I think was probably easier to have a nice spread out house in Pompeii than you would in downtown Rome by the look of it. Now of course, that would depend on what period of history you're speaking about in Rome, but in its densest, heaviest populated time, you needed to crowd people in a little bit more. So things that you get up in Rome and even at Rome's harbor town, Ostia, although that's a bit different also, are the apartment blocks. I don't think you get too many big apartment blocks in the Vesuvian region. Am I correct?

Dr. Lazer

No, there's certainly one in Herculaneum I can think of that's three stories. But I don't think the scale and number would be comparable to what you'd see in Rome. Because yeah, of course, they're not the same sort of occupations.

Associate Professor Welch

Even the land form. I mean, the hills of Rome, they're not quite so observable today. They are in some circumstances, but a lot of them have been filled in over time. But the fact that you're in this hilly area with just some level surfaces means that housing has to be differently configured. But the big blocks of apartments, which were many more than three stories, are a sign that you are trying to pack a massive population into quite a small land area. It's not like Rome has urban sprawl. It does now, but it didn't in antiquity and it didn't until very, very recently. It was a very small land area for a very large population. And we know this is how a lot of the great fires in Rome started were because of the packed-in population. We also know that that things like getting fresh water up to various levels was difficult.

We've got descriptions of people living in these pokey little garrets and thinking about how expensive it was in comparison to a lovely villa in the countryside. So you would find these kinds of contrasts through density of population, impacting on the sorts of the varied sorts of houses. I must say though, that in late antiquity, once the population of Rome fell, and once it wasn't so important politically because Constantine moved the capitol, what we are finding more and more is that a lot of these insular apartment blocks were amalgamated and you do find really big palatial houses beginning to grow up and maybe people buying up real estate and getting two or three different houses and amalgamating them into one house, simply because cities change over time. And I guess that's another big difference with Pompeii. It stops there in 79, and we don't see what would happen. Whereas in Rome, you've got so many complicated layers in on top of each other.

Dr. Lazer

So, in all fairness, in Pompeii, you do have a lot of-

Associate Professor Welch

From before, yes.

Dr. Lazer

Yes. So people are occupying houses sometimes for hundreds of years and they're doing exactly the same thing. They're buying land, they're subdividing. They are-

Associate Professor Welch

Put a [inaudible 00:13:34] upstairs, so they can make a bit more money.

Dr. Lazer

People don't change that much.

Associate Professor Welch

No.

Dr. Lazer

I mean, there are significant differences of course, between then and now, but there are also significant similarities.

Associate Professor Welch

Yes, indeed. And of course, Rome changes through big events like the Great Fire of 64, for example, and Pompeii changes dramatically around the same time because of the earthquake. So we do see a pattern and a parallel, but I don't think Pompeii ever has to cope with anything like the density of the living areas of Rome.

Mind you, I must say that Rome's very interesting because you have these densely packed areas and then you have these huge suburban gardens. So it's not like a complete rat hole for the entire space. You have both the aristocratic gardens, but also the big public gardens. And Rome had a lot of amenities. That's why it could cope with this huge population. It's got, as I said, not just the water supply, but all the imperial buildings, the imperial baths. Again, you find them all in Pompeii and Herculaneum and the other Vesuvian cities. It's just that I don't think you ever find anything that is quite the same as the Baths of Caracalla color or the Baths of Diocletian. You could fit a bit of Pompeii just on the side of the Baths of Caracalla, could you not?

Dr. Lazer

Without a doubt, without a doubt. No, the scale is completely different. Now in terms of politics, would you say it was very different?

Associate Professor Welch

Oh yes. We know so little about Pompeii and Herculaneum politics. We have a name here and there. We have a little bit of an idea about which families might have been important. We know a little bit about the structure, but we really don't get a narrative of the politics in any of the Vesuvian cities. We depend on inscriptions, we depend on incidentals. And it is very interesting for the political historian to try and make sense of what's going on in Pompeii from this very, very, very fragmentary evidence.

To give you an example, one of the most famous citizens of Pompeii is Marcus Holconius Rufus and he's the tribunus a populo. We have no idea what that is. We really don't know what that is because that title, a populo, of the people we think, doesn't occur anywhere else. So we can't tell. Whereas with Rome, because everything's centered on the emperor and everybody wants to know who they're sleeping with and who they're killing and whatever and everything, we'd love to know what they had for breakfast if we could find out. And sometimes the authors tell us, and sometimes we have to sift our way through those narratives to try and work out what might have happened, in fact. But we've got a narrative there, whereas we really don't have a narrative of who is connected with whom.

You might have a fragmentary inscription. You might know, for example, that Eumachia had a son called Marcus Numistrius Fronto. You wouldn't know a single thing that Marcus Numistrius Fronto did. He's Eumachia's son and we know he was a Dumbeer, but we don't quite know what he did with his time in office. So we have snatches and we have an edifice. We understand a little bit about the politics and people have actually done a pretty good job at trying to draw out what we have. But it isn't anything like the grand narrative of say the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire and the history of the emperors and all their households and [inaudible 00:17:05]. Indeed from Rome, we have all this inscriptional evidence as well, but it's added on to a narrative. Whereas in Pompeii, Herculaneum and these other centers, we have only these little scraps to try and make sense of the city.

Dr. Lazer

It's true. So, you think we extrapolate far too much?

Associate Professor Welch

It goes both ways, I think. Because of this Italian culture I was speaking about before, we have many, many, many Italian towns. Pompeii is just one of them and it's one of the best preserved of them. But we have many, many Italian towns, all of with this same sort of inscriptional evidence of statues, of [inaudible 00:17:43] and the rest of it. And so we've got a pretty fair idea about how things worked. It's just as I said, that we don't have the detail of what happened. And it's so tantalizing because there are things that are unique to Pompeii politics. For example, the role of the public priestess that we see in Pompeii with Eumachia that I've mentioned, but also Mamia and others, it's very hard to find exactly that same thing happening in Rome. And you sort of see something similar in a town like Pastam, but it's similar but different. Neither Eumachia nor Mamia finds any reason to mention a husband. And yet the other examples I can think of all seem to relate women inside both their natal family and their marital family. Whereas Eumachia ... Mr. Numistrius Fronto that no doubt fathered young Numistrius Fronto, he never gets a mention. We never hear of him.

Dr. Lazer

That's really interesting, isn't it?

Associate Professor Welch

It is. It means there are things that are unique to Pompeii and we should not think that we are going to find the same thing either in Rome or even in another Italian town. It's unique to their politics and their system and their hierarchy.

Dr. Lazer

Which is great and it makes studying it even more worthwhile because we see that there's some diversity across the peninsula.

Associate Professor Welch

Absolutely is. Yes.

Dr. Lazer

Which I think is really important. And I know the last thing just to tie in with that is, why are we studying the skeletons? Why do they have so much pull from Pompeii and now Herculaneum as well before? Up until 1980, Herculaneum wasn't in the picture purely because they didn't find bodies there. And so the interpretation was that everyone escaped, and this is the joy archeology. The second that you put your trowel in the ground, you're going to find something that makes you have to rewrite the past. And we don't have literary evidence. So we absolutely relying on the archeological remains.

Associate Professor Welch

Absolutely. And if we could just add to that. In other centers, the skeletons in Rome, for example, they're just not there or they're not available or they haven't been available. I mean, they're still finding things. They're still finding all sorts of things, but we've relied on cemeteries and descriptions, Furian inscriptions and the rest of it, from a city that ... These things have been overturned for a long time. So the basis of the evidence is different. Even when we do find the skeletons, we don't find the situation, that we find people that have died through illness or whatever. And so we don't get the snapshot that you've so brilliantly drawn for us, of a population that all died at the same time of an accident. And therefore you can study them in their wellness rather than in their illness. And-

Dr. Lazer

It's true.

Associate Professor Welch

... I think that does make Pompeii and the other Vesuvian cities where there are skeletal remains very different.

Dr. Lazer

Absolutely true. They're completely unique because as you said, we have large samples of people who died of the same cause at roughly the same time. They didn't all die exactly the same time, but of the same event.

Associate Professor Welch

I deal in centuries. It's the same time.

Dr. Lazer

Yeah, yeah. Close enough. And it's true. What we get from the cemetery's quite different to what we'll get from a living population. So we don't have the population. That's very important to bear in mind. We've got a sample of victims. We don't have all the victims, but what we do have and what we appear to have at least at Pompeii ... Herculaneum is a little more complicated. But at Pompeii, doesn't seem to be any apparent skewing towards, well, anything, sex, age of death, pathology. So we do seem to have a pretty good indication of who might have been about at the time.

And in a cemetery population, you do get the people who don't survive. So what you'll see in a cemetery population that you won't see in Pompeii or Herculaneum is evidence of infant mortality, for example, which we know was very, very high. But you just have no evidence for it at all in a site like Pompeii. So it gives us a completely different insight into antiquity, to any cemetery population. And there really is no parallel.

Associate Professor Welch

Especially when most cemetery populations from antiquity are pretty fragmented. You only get a little bit of the cemetery often, and you don't even get the full picture of what might have been there. And preservation is always so [inaudible 00:22:40].

Dr. Lazer

Very uncertain. Yeah. Well, even with Pompeii, most of our problems are post-excavation problems. So when they started digging from 1748 that they just ... Archeology didn't exist, so we can't ... It's developed with the excavation of the site. And the fact that they kept bones was pretty amazing, but they didn't keep them that carefully. So we've lost a lot of information. And the reason that we are doing the cast study initially, though, of course it's changed, but the initial aim was to actually see fully articulated skeletons to actually compare the results with what we have from the victims that weren't preserved in ... the post forms weren't preserved in ash.

Associate Professor Welch

Yes. And so to come back to my role, I guess everything we do in history needs context. Everything we do when we look at Pompeii should be monitored for what's happening in Rome and the rest of the Roman Empire and to pull out the distinctive material and why it's distinctive. And also to see when it does fit into a different context. And so in this regard too, the work of our friend, Ferdinando De Simone, is looking at what happens in the region in the centuries following the AD 79 eruption is all such critical information. Because we're better able to understand Pompeii if we can locate it in its own context, but also in the context of Roman Italy and the Mediterranean world in general.

Dr. Lazer

Yeah, absolutely. Well, the work that's being done in areas that aren't on the coast of the Bay of Naples is completely making us rethink the past. So the AD 79 eruption, it was apocalyptic for those sites that we know so well, so Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis, Boscoreale, Stabiae. It was pretty terrible, but there are a lot of places that survived. I mean, Naples for example, seems to have been all right. And closer, we've got their area around Monte Soma where you've got evidence of people coming back and reoccupying. So they're not necessarily reoccupying the sites as they were originally, but they're re-occupying and they're doing a lot of agriculture.

There's a very big industry in wine production because growing grapes. They're pressing grapes, they're fermenting the wine. And it's a very important industry that continues on. And we have pretty good evidence that it's going all the way through, at least up until the 5th century till 472.

Associate Professor Welch

So we are learning this.

Dr. Lazer

Yeah. And that's the wonderful thing. Again, the more we expand our horizons archeologically, the more we understand about the ancient world.

Associate Professor Welch

And if ever we get more documents out of the library in the Villa of the Papyri, perhaps I'll know some more history than I know now.

Dr. Lazer

Yeah.

[end of transcript]

Associate Professor Kathryn Welcher

So today, Associate Professor Kathryn Welch and Dr. Estelle Lazer are discussing aspects of the Pompeii Cast project. And we're most interested today in getting to work on the site and then what you have to keep in mind in terms of being allowed to work on the site. So this is Kathryn.

I'd like to ask Estelle. Estelle, how did you first come to work at Pompeii?

Dr. Lazer

I first started working in Pompeii as a postgraduate student studying the human skeletal remains, which amazingly hadn't had a really thorough, what we call sort of like a 20th century study done on them. Sydney University had a project at the time, and it was essential to have some pedigree that there were people who'd actually worked on the site and provided results so that there was... You can't just work at Pompeii. You have to come with some sort of backup so you'd have to have the backing of an institution with a good track record. So an application was made for me to study the human skeletal remains, and I was given permission by the then superintendent of the site, Professor [inaudible 00:01:24].

Associate Professor Welch

Can you explain the role of the superintendent in those days?

Is it not?

Dr. Lazer

The superintendent was in charge of the site, so they looked after the management of the site, the running of the site, and they usually would be a scholar, so they'd be involved in some research on the site as well. In those days, they were still doing major excavations, so they would oversee that.

Associate Professor Welch

Okay. And who would help? What sort of backup?

Dr. Lazer

Yeah, there's a whole administrative backup system there so there would be a director of archeology, there would be various officials, there were restorers. So

there was a whole staff of people as well as, and very importantly, a lot of guards who'd look after the site.

Associate Professor Welch

Can you tell us about the guards?

Dr. Lazer

Oh, definitely. And a lot of scholars would sort of split the difference and say about The guards are very interesting. A lot of them had been there for a very, very long time and they took varying amounts of interest in the site, but they really cared about the research that was done. The work I was doing involved me getting access into mostly two buildings where bones were stored and these were quite secure locations, so they were ancient buildings. For some reason, they were bath buildings, which were only accessible to three guards on the site. Only three people had security clearance to hold those keys so I could only work when one of those three guards was there.

Associate Professor Welch

Interesting. Were there any particular characters, individuals that stood out from among the guards in the years when you were there as a student?

Dr. Lazer

Oh, well, they were all pretty amazing. Just even to get to work took a bit of effort so I would have to go to the office where these particular guards were, which is near the Forum in Pompeii. They would always hope that I was working in the bath complex nearest them because the other one was blocked off with a fence because there'd been a very big earthquake in the region in 1980. So that involved walking right through the length of the Forum, climbing a fence, beating our way through really major growth of fennel and other plants that had self-seeded and sometimes they held interesting wildlife like snakes. Then we'd have to open up this ancient bath building. It was a bit of an effort to get there and then they would lock me in because I didn't have security clearance for the key.

Associate Professor Welch

How long did it take you to get your own key?

Dr. Lazer

It took a few years. When I first started working, I would have a discussion when I got to the gate of my building when they let me in and locked me in and that would be basically when they'd let me out. If I was foolish enough to ask for all day in the

bath complex, I would have to rely on the morning guard telling the afternoon guard that I was in there. Otherwise, I didn't get out again.

Associate Professor Welch

Was there any time that you were locked in?

Dr. Lazer

Yes, there was. So I did have some interesting moments where, yeah, I spent many happy hours trapped in a building with, well, there was no mobile phone possibilities in those days. Also there would've been no reception had there been so yes, I had some long hours. For some reason, everyone on the site believes that I spent whole nights there, but I didn't.

Associate Professor Welch

That's a legend.

Dr. Lazer

It is a legend.

Associate Professor Welch

A legend of Estelle Lazer.

Dr. Lazer

It is. So, if you speak to any guard on the site, they will tell you. Even the current outgoing director general has asked me about that because everyone believes that I did spend whole nights there.

Associate Professor Welch

If it's not true, it's well located, as they say. Okay. So what's different now in how the site is managed? Is it still the same or is it different?

Dr. Lazer

No, it's changed in the last few years. It's become an autonomous museum, so it's now called the Pompeii Archeological Site. Before the superintendency was bound with Herculaneum, and now it's separate, I believe it's Pompeii and Oplontis. I think it's Stabiae and Boscoreale as well. But Herculaneum is a separate autonomous museum and one level of bureaucracy has been removed so that's good because these relate to the ministry of culture, so as their name suggests, they've got more

autonomy. But then the position of the director of the site is much higher than it was, even when I started working many years ago, last century.

Associate Professor Welch

And there are now an army of experts that also work on the site, are there not?

Dr. Lazer

There are. Well, there was always the scientific laboratory, but that's really been upgraded and certainly thanks to Professor Massimo Osanna, who's really built up the laboratory and the laboratory's expertise. So, for the first time ever, they've employed a full-time physical anthropologist on the site, which is really important. Because whenever they're excavating, even when they're not planning major archeological works, sometimes just logistic works are going to yield, I mean they will yield material and you need someone on the site. They've got archeozoologists, they've got archeobotanists, they're working closely with volcanologists. So they've got a huge number of people that whose expertise they're drawing on and that really lifts the game of what kind of information's now coming out of the site.

Associate Professor Welch

And even so, there's still room for us.

Dr. Lazer

Yes. Well, we're doing something quite different and there's always room for other scholars. Pompeii is huge site. I mean really it's a whole town or city, depending how you interpret it, and there's so much material. There is room for so many scholars from so many countries, and there's a very long tradition of scholarship, a multinational scholarship.

Associate Professor Welch

So building on what you've told us about the need for a pedigree to get in there, today, if someone wanted to start working on the site, how would they go about it?

Dr. Lazer

Well, you'd have to be affiliated with an institution. So I don't think you can just apply as, "I'm an interested person, can I do research?" You'd have to have the backing of some institution, I would think, and then you'd have to apply to the, well, to the Pompeii Archeological Park for permission to do that work. You'd have to have a research design. And, of course, the research you're doing shouldn't be impinging on anybody else's so they do try to keep projects separate. Of course, things overlap, but generally, you'd have an area that no one's studied before.

The idea is that the information gets amalgamated with everything else that's been done so you have a requirement to publish and you've also got a requirement, and I think this is a very good one, to lodge the data that you collect with the Pompeii Archeological Park. Now, they don't necessarily do anything except archive it. But one of the problems in the past was that people would come and start projects and they'd spend a lot of time collecting data that were never given back to the park. So they never had any access to the raw data and a lot of work's been done onsite, a lot of data have been collected and never published. So this way, at least even if the publications aren't forthcoming, at least the data are stored onsite.

Associate Professor Welch

Now I want to ask you a lot more about that, particularly with respect to our own project. But before we move on, can you just tell us the difference, if there is one, between a superintendent and the director general? Because we raised both those names, but we didn't get a chance to actually talk about what the difference might be.

Dr. Lazer

It's a bit hard to tell, actually. I think the director general is a slightly higher position and, like I said, there's one level of bureaucracy removed. So they're much more in contact with the minister of culture so I think it just makes it easier for them to operate with the governmental authorities.

Associate Professor Welch

That's great. Thanks. The other thing that might be interesting to know is are these guards that you encountered back as a student, the same kind of person today? Do they employ the same kinds of people today as guards or are the guards different?

Dr. Lazer

Yeah, guards are complicated. Before, I'm not sure what it took to become a guard-

Associate Professor Welch

Live in the area?

Dr. Lazer

I think that was definitely part of it and a lot of them were-

Associate Professor Welch

Your grandfather was a guard?

Dr. Lazer

Yeah. And a lot of the retired guards would become guides on the site. So it's much less sort of, I don't know, just a job that you could take on. The company that provides a lot of the guards onsite is called [inaudible 00:11:21], and the people they employ-

Associate Professor Welch

Today?

Dr. Lazer

Today, they're not specifically guards so there's various levels there, too. I don't think they really describe themselves as guards, but they have employed graduates from archeology, fine arts, languages, culture, and they have a number of languages that they speak. They stay in various locations in the houses generally, and they try and control the crowds that come through the houses. But they also make sure that nothing terrible happens, that the numbers aren't too great that they overwhelm the structures or that they put them at risk or people do any damage. But the other thing is because they have this phenomenal education, they can also provide information about places to any visitor to the site in a number of languages.

Associate Professor Welch

So this is a very different situation from when you first visited the site. These people are much better educated and much more committed to conservation.

Dr. Lazer

Yeah. But there are still guards. I mean, what happened and the reason that this started was because when they had the global financial crisis, there was a freeze put on public servants, so they couldn't employ new public servants. So as people became old and retired, they weren't able to be replaced, that this was a solution and a very good one as it transpires. But they're not the same as the guards so we still have both on the site.

Associate Professor Welch

And it's great to see both there and some of them still recognize you, even the guards.

Dr. Lazer

Yeah, the old ones.

Associate Professor Welch

Okay. Then let's come back down to the idea of how we work on this site and you've taken us a little way down the road of this. But now the University of Sydney has a memorandum of agreement with the Pompeii Archeological Park so that we can do our work. Would do you mind to talk a little bit about what a memorandum of agreement is and why it's a good thing to have one?

Dr. Lazer

Well, it ties our research project in with the Pompeii Archeological Park so it's a two-way relationship. The reason that we have it, and it is remarkable, it was requested by Professor Massimo Osanna as director of the site. He felt that our project was of too much importance not to be affiliated with the Pompeii Archeological Park. So generally, you would apply for permission to do a project, you'd get a permit and you would work on that project fairly independently. This request is the first time I've ever encountered it, and it involved quite a complex legal process, which perhaps you'd like to talk a little more about.

Associate Professor Welch

Well, it was a very interesting time in our lives back in 2017 when we tried to bring this memorandum of agreement to fruition. Any communication with the Pompeii Archeological Park, as I think Estelle has already indicated without necessarily giving you detail, is a complicated issue. We're very fortunate, just to take us back to the beginning of the process, we're very fortunate to have at least two people and sometimes more, that live in Italy and often help us negotiate the process. They know the exact individual to go and talk to, to get the process moving and also the best way to put the request. One particular friend is excellent at rephrasing whatever we, simple Australians, have to say in the most florid and formal Italian that you can possibly read with more superlatives than I think we would put in an entire thesis if we'd written it ourselves.

So, all of these little things that are cultural and very important about how one goes about this process were all done. And Estella has said that the Pompeii Archeological Park asked us to apply for this, but it didn't mean they weren't going to make our lives a little bit difficult in the process of actually achieving this and it took us some months to get the paperwork in place. Of course, our own people here at the University of Sydney had to look over it, had to make sure that it was legally possible for them to sign it in good faith. So we had a wonderful person in the Office of General Counsel that made sure that from the university's point of view, we were not signing anything that the university could not stand by in a court. That was all done. Then it had to be translated into Italian. So yet another friend of ours did the initial translation into Italian for us, completely without charging us any money and putting quite a lot of her personal time into this. Eventually, my own Italian teacher helped us out a little bit.

I must say that for part of the time, Estelle and I were both traveling. I was in Germany and she was in Italy and so we were communicating by much better electronic methods than existed when you were locked into the Sarno baths and it went on and on and on. Eventually, perhaps 24 hours before Estelle was about to film a documentary, we finally got the approval and then some months later, perhaps involving a [inaudible 00:17:00] figure of Professor Massimo Osanna just to help us along, the memorandum was signed and, of course, now we're in the process of having that renewed to continue our work. It was a massive achievement on both their parts and ours and it has worked extremely well for us. We've had the good fortune under the banner, under the aegis of that memorandum to return with our team to do quite a lot of work, x-raying and CT-scanning quite a number of the casts, sometimes with the help of TV documentary companies and sometimes on our own steam as a research field season from the University of Sydney.

Dr. Lazer

So supported by the University of Sydney with small grants and-

Associate Professor Welch

Which we can make go a long way.

Dr. Lazer

That is true. Yes.

Associate Professor Welch

Okay. So how we got the grant was amazing. Now then, what does this mean for how we do our fieldwork now?

Dr. Lazer

Well, when we do our field work, so even though we have a memorandum of agreement and we have permission for the project, every step of the way requires another permit. Every step of the way requires another permit, especially if we are working with a documentary company. So for each field season, and sometimes for each portion of each project for the field season, we need to get another permit and we have liaison people that we work with. Currently, we're working with the head of the scientific laboratory, who's also the physical anthropologist onsite, Valeria Amoretti, who's wonderful and we've known her since she started working in Pompeii so she's grown into the project. She isn't actually involved in the project, but she's present when we do our work, just to be a presence representing the Pompeii Archeological Park and to make sure that not only that nothing goes wrong, that we look after everything, but also that we get logistic support from the guards on the site who don't always want to open things up or stay up late at night or early in the morning for us. So she smooths things out and makes sure that they all happen. So it's a complex process and, of course, she's interested in our project and we like having her with us when we're doing our work.

Associate Professor Welch

And she's certainly learned how skilled our team is.

Dr. Lazer

Yeah, our team's fantastic, I have to say, but we'll talk about that a bit later.

Associate Professor Welch

We will do that. The final thing I'm going to ask in this is in terms of our relationship with the Pompeii Archeological Park, how do we go about submitting the data that you have said is such an incredibly important part of the process?

Dr. Lazer

Well, that involves some complex documentation, which took us a while to discover because no one told us about it. But you have to get a special protocol and protocol number, and it has to be lodged in the correct way so that everyone accepts that it has been lodged and it is kept there. Then it's put into the archives of the Pompeii Archeological Park. They won't do anything with it. It's not handed out to anyone else. It's ours until we cease our project so we have publication rights, so it's our intellectual property. But it also rests with the Pompeii Archeological Park in case something happens and they don't receive publications, at least the data are preserved.

Associate Professor Welch

That's wonderful. Is there anything more you'd like to say about the relationship that we have with the Italians and with the workers and operators of the Pompeii Archeological Park?

Dr. Lazer

Well, we have a wonderful relationship. I mean, I've been working there for way too many years, and so I do have good, I mean, it's really important to have good relations from every level. If you're recognized by the people on the ground, the guards and the workers on the site, they respect the fact that we work hard. They've seen us work hard, and they assist us with our work. And really, without them, we couldn't do anything.

Associate Professor Welch

And if we're there with our x-ray machine and they want something x-rayed, then we do it.

Dr. Lazer

Oh, that's true. We also do extra things for them. So we've been asked to x-ray some very interesting things, all of them relating to Pompeii, I hasten to add, but some of the more unusual finds we've been asked to x-ray to find out what on earth they are.

Associate Professor Welch

Estelle, thank you. I think you've given us some real insight into how we do our work and some of the difficulties involved that you can't just waltz in and say, "Here I am. Can I please work?" It's worth getting your archeology and ancient history credentials in place. It's worth knowing a little bit of Italian. All of these things for students, if you want to work in Pompeii, it doesn't happen overnight.

Dr. Lazer

Thank you. Thank you, Kathryn.

[end of transcript]

Dr. Leigh Dayton

My name is Dr. Leigh Dayton, and I'm here today with Dr. Estelle Lazer. And the topic for our discussion is the future of tourism and the Future of the site of Pompeii. So very first question, Estelle, what are the pros and the cons of tourism in a site like Pompeii and Pompeii specifically?

Dr. Estelle Lazer

Well, Pompeii is one of the best known sites in the world. I mean, I think people, when they think of archeology, they think of Egypt, the Pyramids, the Sphinx and Pompeii. And so everyone wants to see Pompeii. It's on the UNESCO World Heritage List and it's an amazing site. There really are very few sites in the world that could in any way compare to it. So it's very heavily visited, it has been for some time. And up until 2020, it had increasing numbers of visitors every year. So in 2019, the number hit about 4 million.

Dr. Dayton

Wow.

Dr. Lazer

Of course, post-COVID, things have changed rather significantly.

Dr. Dayton

Well, what are pros? What are the advantages of having tourism at a site like Pompeii?

Dr. Lazer

Well, one of the big advantages is that everyone who goes on site buys a ticket. And so the money from the tickets now is used to look after the site. So the financial benefit is very great. So sites, especially huge above ground sites. So Pompeii is 66 hectares within the walls, about 49 of which are excavated. It's a big area and it needs constant maintenance. And having people go through the site all the time means that it's looked at all the time. So if there are problems, they can be identified. The cons are that 4 million people is just way too many for a site like that to handle. It was never visited by 4 million people in a year, I'm sure, in antiquity. And they're literally loving it to death.

Up until now, and things have radically changed, of course, in the last year as a result of the pandemic. But up until now, you could visit the site without having a guide, without anyone really checking on what you were doing. So it was possible to inadvertently do a huge amount of damage just through ignorance. And that's been a

big problem. One of the other problems is cruise ships can come with vast numbers of people, and they cross the site like armies. They're on very strict timetables and they don't want to lose their guides, so that makes them not really careful about what they're walking over or banging into or brushing against. So that really is a problem.

And generally, people aren't necessarily educated to understand that it's like a museum. You don't touch the walls and you don't lean on things. And the site's large and exposed and it's exhausting. The ground's very uneven. People get tired, so they inadvertently do quite a bit of damage. So one of the things that was done to mitigate the problem, I mean, one of the big problems with tourist journeys and a lot of guided tours, the classic guided tours, is that they have very limited itineraries that they can take people through the site in a short amount of time and show them a number of different structures. So the large outdoor buildings and public spaces, and also some of the more intimate spaces, the domestic structures. And these are a real problem because they're small areas that have got fragile wall paintings on them. And if you take upwards of 50 people into a place in a short time, they're going to do damage.

If they're wearing backpacks and they turn around, they can scrape paint off the walls. They can do quite a bit of damage. So one of the things that the soon-to-be outgoing director of Pompeii, Professor Massimo Osanna did, was to open up a lot more buildings for visitors, not just because it improves the visitor experience, but because it disperses the crowd. So in 2010, there were a lot of falls of buildings, a lot of collapses on the site because of neglect. And UNESCO came to visit the site and issued a ultimatum that the site had to be remediated by 2015 or it would lose its World Heritage status. And from that, the Great Pompeii Project was born. And that was one of the issues that they asked to be addressed. So that moving people across the site, improving the visitor experience, improving education on the site so that people could find out more at an academic and at a popular level. And that they could have a much bigger area to walk around so that hopefully you could disperse the large numbers.

And another problem that was on the site was that there weren't enough guards, especially in about 2009 I think there was a global financial crisis. And public servants' positions were frozen in Italy like many other places. And they weren't employing new guards. So one of the ways around this was that a company called [inaudible 00:05:50] provided people who were very well-educated, so they had university degrees in archeology, classics, art history, languages. And they would be positioned in the houses to try and control the crowds. But not just to make sure they weren't touching the walls or doing damage or that there were too many people going in at any one time, but also to provide information in a number of different languages if people had questions. So that's definitely improved the visitor experience and has protected the site.

Dr. Dayton

As you're talking, most of the issues that you've raised have to do with physical damage to the site. What about the tourist impact on the ongoing research?

Dr. Lazer

That isn't really such an issue. So there is constant research on the site. A lot of the research is done either in the early mornings or the late afternoons or out of season.

Or areas, if they're excavating, get roped off. So I don't think that tourists have a big impact on research. It's done around tourists. And tourists, of course, love to see if there's something happening on-site. But research has been ongoing always, except in the last year, of course. Access to Pompeii has become quite difficult.

Dr. Dayton

What are the future plans for the site once we get over the problems with the pandemic?

Dr. Lazer

Yeah, it's hard to know. So certainly site management is complex issue. And as Professor Osanna said to me when he first started that what he didn't realize when he took on the job, because he's an academic, was that for every decision you make, there are consequences. So you try to do your best, but sometimes you make a decision that isn't necessarily good. But essentially, the aim is to maximize visitor access to the site. They have started new excavations, and that's part of the Great Pompeii Project. These are not uncontroversial decisions.

But basically what they were asked to do was to provide disabled access and also to improve drainage because what's not excavated sits over the excavated area. So when it rains, the water gets funneled down onto the site, so they've been asked to channel it away. So there is ongoing work on the site, and that will definitely continue. There's about to be a change of director generals because Professor Osanna's being promoted to director of all the museums in Italy now. So what happens next is a little bit of an unknown, but possibly it'll continue in the same vein. We don't know yet.

Dr. Dayton

Now, this doesn't deal directly with tourism per se, but it will in the long run. And that is, can you point out some of the key directions of research at the moment?

Dr. Lazer

In Pompeii?

Dr. Dayton

In Pompeii?

Dr. Lazer

Oh, there's so many. So there are many, many nations, and there have been for as long as I've been working there and much longer. There are projects from pretty much every nation in the world. And they cover things like the early history of Pompeii. That's something that hasn't been explored very much because generally the site management strategy's been to dig down to the 80, 79 level, not below. So opportunistically, there's some work going on below those levels to learn about the earlier occupation history, because we know there was at least seven to 800 years of occupation before Mount Vesuvius erupted. There's a lot of work in mapping the site,

in scanning and recording buildings and other structures using new technologies and producing virtual versions of the site, not just above ground, but also below ground.

And there's new excavations going on, which were started in 2018 by Professor Osanna and his team. They're obviously Italian-run, but there are collaborations everywhere, of course. We've got our project on the [inaudible 00:10:39] of the victims. There's a lot of science because there's so much at the site. So things like residue analysis and other areas that went particularly examined early on, there are people doing that work. There's studies of the pottery. Their studies is mountains of artifacts. So there's work being done on the structures, on the streetscapes, on the artifacts. And then these studies of the plant life, of the animals, of the food. There's just a huge range of subjects. I mean, it's almost endless.

Dr. Dayton

Well, and all of that work is going to be part of the tourist experience in the future under the Great Pompeii Project, yes?

Dr. Lazer

Yeah. So that is one of the requirements, that information's disseminated at a popular and academic level. So there's certainly there's several spaces on-site. There's an antiquarium that was bombed in World War II that has been rebuilt. And there's also a part of the large gymnasium, or palestra, that have exhibition spaces with changing exhibitions. So there's a lot of educational material on-site and a lot of artifacts that you wouldn't normally see. There are things in situ as well. So certainly the learning experience is much, much better than it was, say, 10 years ago.

Dr. Dayton

Are there any other final points or comments you'd like to make on this topic, focusing on the tourism?

Dr. Lazer

On tourism? Yeah, it's a two-edged sword. I think it's important that people have access to a site like this. It's problematic because it needs to be controlled in some ways. And it certainly wasn't controlled up until COVID hit. And COVID, I mean, it's been terrible, but it is an opportunity to stop and rethink. And so the site has been closed twice now for prolonged periods. And it's just reopened, in fact, for the second time. And what they've done is they've, well, the first time it reopened they had several entrance and exit points. And of course you had to have your temperature taken and you had to pre-book tickets. And there was an app you could download which would tell you in real time where other people were on the site so you could avoid them. And there were two routes that you could follow that covered the site, but you would follow them in different directions. And the idea was basically to keep people apart but still have a good experience. They've just reopened the site because they've had a terrible second spike of COVID. And now it's January, they've just reopened with one entrance and exit. Again, you have to have your temperature taken, you have to pre-book tickets. So they only allow a certain number of visitors per hour. And it's a very, very strict route that you travel through. And the numbers, of course, are very small. So they limited the number of people that could go in per hour at any time, which is why you pre-book your tickets.

And while this means that there's not much spontaneity when you go there, you have to plan your trip, it does mean that you don't get crushed in large crowds. And certainly it'll change as the pandemic comes to an end, but hopefully it gives the opportunity for a pause and a rethink about how better to manage the tourist experience on-site, because it could never continue with those huge, huge numbers. Regardless of the revenue that they brought in, the damage was much greater. So I think that there'll be more emphasis perhaps, or I hope there'll be more emphasis on controlling the numbers, maybe restricting numbers per day or per hour, and maybe encouraging a little more oversight on the visitors to the site.

Dr. Dayton

That's a good outcome from a terrible experience.

Dr. Lazer

Hopefully, hopefully.

Dr. Dayton

So, Dr. Estelle Lazer, thank you very much.

Dr. Lazer

Thank you.

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