Digging deeper: Archaeologists race to show Pompeii daily life

— -- Mount Vesuvius still looms, quiet for now, over Pompeii. But for the lost Roman city, the drama never really ends.

Buried in A.D. 79 by the volcano's eruption, the storied victim of antiquity continues to surprise scholars with new discoveries, even as their hopes dim for the site's survival.

"There is a lot going on, and it's always in crisis," says classicist Kenneth Lapatin of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Pompeii lay silent under about 20 feet of volcanic ash and stone until it was discovered in 1748. Since then, it has never been out of the public eye.

• Historians are continually working to separate the myths about Pompeii from the reality of how its artists, athletes, leaders and citizens lived in the years before the volcanic blew. Continuing excavation — 30% of Pompeii is still buried — has produced a steady stream of discoveries.

For example, researchers at the United Kingdom's Warwick University are now working on a digital re-creation of the statue of a wounded Amazon warrior discovered in 2006. In recent years, scholars have focused on how the ancient Greeks and Romans painted their statues with colors that seem garish compared to the cool marble creations of the Renaissance.

• A major exhibit of artifacts titled Pompeii and the Roman Villa has gone from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it will stay until Oct. 4.

There is a companion exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Getty villa that houses this exhibit is a replica of the Villa of the Papyri, a library of Greek manuscripts unearthed at Pompeii's sister city of Herculaneum, also buried by Vesuvius.

• Scientists fear that Pompeii itself will ultimately be undone by exposure to the weather and the 2.5 million tourists who visit each year. The Italian government last year declared a state of emergency to speed preservation efforts at the 109-acre ruin.

"It is enormously expensive to keep in working condition. Just removing the weeds is a great deal of work," says Cambridge University's Mary Beard, author of The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. "A ruin is always going to become ruined when you expose it."

'Stage sets for power'

Pompeii was a small Italian city south of modern-day Naples, tucked in amid a region of sumptuous villas, "the Beverly Hills or Malibu of the Roman Empire," says Barbara Pflaumer at the Los Angeles museum.

The grand villas "were not just luxury resorts of the rich and famous. They were temporary abodes of some very, very powerful and very, very wealthy people, probably Roman senators," says architectural historian Thomas Howe of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

"They may indeed have hired brilliant artists to surround them with an aura of myth and eternal beauty — frescoes, sculpture, fountains, music, cuisine — but they were really stage sets for power," Howe says. "Every summer the capital virtually moved from Rome to these villas in the Bay of Naples."

Beard says scientific archaeology has made "enormous changes" in the efforts to unravel Pompeii's mysteries. Scholars now look at bones, seeds, roots, even curbstones, on the microscopic level to make findings about how the ancients lived.

Sixty-four hundred to 30,000 people lived in Pompeii in 79, Beard says. Only about 2,000 died in the eruption; the rest fled with the first tremors. "The ground trembled for weeks beforehand. Only the infirm, the stupid and the optimists stayed," Beard says.

Rather than a city frozen in time, as scholars have described Pompeii, it was an emptied disaster scene, goods removed and doors locked, when Vesuvius covered the town with ash.

Archaeologists are still making discoveries about the real lives of the lost inhabitants. The Blogging Pompeii website run by archaeologists lists 19 projects in the region, for example. There, scholars such as Rebecca Benefiel of Washington and Lee University continue to steadily document houses there.

"So far, more than 11,000 wall inscriptions have been recorded there," Benefiel says. She recently analyzed graffiti scrawled on the Basilica law courts of Pompeii that celebrated trigon, a Roman game. (Three players form a triangle and pass a ball. Each drop was a point for the other players.) "Pompeii is great for what it gives us. You can't get that level of detail anywhere else," she says.

Other recent finds:

• University of Kentucky researchers this month announced their three-dimensional scan of an unopened papyrus scroll, collected with the aim of "virtually" unrolling the charred document.

• An ivory "throne" discovered in Herculaneum last year turns out to be an elaborate incense burner tripod, Maria Paola Guidobaldi of the Archaeological Office of Napoli and Pompeii reported at a June symposium at the Getty museum.

At the Los Angeles exhibits, curators hope to similarly show a different face of Pompeii.

"A lot of the past shows were about the dead, people caught in the eruption," says Jarrett Lobell of Archaeology magazine. Plaster casts of human remains that were preserved as hollow spaces in the volcanic ash are among famous artifacts of Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Instead, the exhibits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum focus on the good life among Rome's jet set, who re-created Greek art and Macedonian palaces to show off their status among their peers.

Scholars have turned from looking at Pompeii on the day of the eruption to how residents lived their lives in the centuries before the disaster, Lapatin says.

In June, the Getty hosted a two-day scholarly symposium on Pompeii and its environs. Lapatin says talks centered on the Etruscan and Greek interaction in Italy. The Etruscans were a dominant culture of city-states in central Italy that fought and traded with Greek colonists before the days of the Roman Empire.

The remains of villas allow scholars to reconstruct how Rome's plutocrats changed Greek art, taking a famous painting of Alexander the Great, for example, and making it into a mosaic. Statues of famed philosophers were imported or created as garden decorations.

One exhibit artifact, a deity's statue, held hors d'oeuvres, which might reflect cheeky Roman humor. But nobody knows for sure.

What lies beneath

Meanwhile in Italy, the big drama comes with the possible retirement of longtime Pompeii superintendent, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, who has been in charge of the historic site since 1995.

In recent years, Guzzo has focused on conservation rather than starting new excavations at Pompeii and nearby sites. Still buried under Vesuvius' cooled lava are parts of both Pompeii and Herculaneum; Oplontis, a villa that might have belonged to the emperor Nero's wife; and Stabiae, a site that Howe says is "the largest concentration of excellently preserved enormous Roman villas in the entire Mediterranean world."

Exposure, however, robs the bright colors of frescoes and paintings uncovered from villas and houses. Tourist's footsteps and hands chip away at the stones of Pompeii. Weather and weeds work away at the foundations of homes preserved for centuries by volcanic ash.

Looting still takes place. Six years ago, frescoes from an excavated dwelling called the "House of the Chaste Lovers" disappeared and turned up in an abandoned building days later.

Whoever succeeds Puzzo, "the pressure for conservation is so great that it will probably continue to be a focus," Archaeology's Lobell says.

But for classicists, historians and archaeologists, Pompeii is "a wonderful site," Beard says.

"It's terribly problematic, it's terribly hard to keep up. We'll never do as well with it as we want, but it is always helping us answer questions about the ancient world," she says. "It would be a sad day if all the questions were answered, wouldn't it?"