From the Archive: Andrew Wallace-Hadrill on Herculaneum
This live interview was first broadcast in 2012 on my former radio show, Prof Talk, live on CiTR 101.9 FM at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, one of the world’s leading scholars of Pompeii and Herculaneum, was then directing the Herculaneum Conservation Project and serving as Master of Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge.
His scholarship has also reached a wide public through numerous radio and television appearances, including the BBC documentary The Other Pompeii: Life and Death in Herculaneum.
I returned to this conversation after meeting Sylvia L’Écuyer at Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at the Chan Centre last night. Sylvia, a musicologist and longtime Radio-Canada host, told me that she would soon be visiting Pompeii and perhaps Herculaneum. Hearing about her plans reminded me of this interview and made me want to bring it out of the archive—for Sylvia, and for anyone else drawn to this extraordinary ancient Roman city and the continuing struggle to preserve it.
Transcript
Transcript lightly edited for clarity while preserving the natural rhythm of the live conversation.
Farha: Hello, and welcome to Prof Talk.
The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD destroyed not only the world-famous site of Pompeii, but also its smaller and, in many ways, more fascinating neighbour, Herculaneum.
Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is my guest today, and he’s on a mission to preserve this ancient Roman city.
Since 2001, he has directed the Herculaneum Conservation Project with the Packard Humanities Institute in preserving this uniquely valuable, but at the same time fragile, archaeological site.
He’s also the Master of Sidney Sussex College and Professor of Roman Studies at Cambridge University. Previously, he served as Director of the British School at Rome. He has published many studies, articles, and books, including Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum, which won the Archaeological Institute of America’s James R. Wiseman Award, and, most recently, Herculaneum: Past and Future, published in 2011.
It’s really a great pleasure to have Andrew join me live here in the studio at CiTR. Thank you so much, Andrew, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us.
Andrew: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Farha: Now, welcome to UBC. It’s not your first time that you’ve been here, but welcome again after a few years of being away.
Andrew: Well, I could say, once you see Vancouver, it’s hard not to accept an invitation to come back again. It is one of the most beautiful cities I know.
Farha: That’s fantastic. Well, I wanted to start with a discussion about your beginnings. One thing that struck me was something I read about your first visit to Italy.
I read that, when you were a teenager, you visited Italy and became fascinated by the ancient Romans and the remnants of the world they left behind. Looking back, do you still feel that same fascination today, as you did all those years ago?
Andrew: Yes, absolutely. I guess I was a teenager—I was 15, 16—when I first went to Italy. And, like many people, I’d been studying the ancient Romans in texts. I’d been reading Latin, quite a painful process at times, you know. When you’re young and you’re being taught Latin grammar, it seems a form of torture, really.
And then you gradually get on top of it, and you begin to read the text quite fluently. And you get to know these people, and you hear their voices, but you haven’t got a physical context to put them in.
And I think, like many people—many people trained as classicists—when I first went to Rome, it absolutely blew me away. And similarly, when we did a standard family holiday, you know, two-centre trip, a week in Rome and a week in Sorrento, and from Sorrento I visited Pompeii and Herculaneum, and was deeply fascinated.
And I think it’s very hard, even today, even with all the problems that the sites manage to generate—and often you hear more about the problems than anything else, complaints that the sites are falling to pieces, and this is very serious—but the sites have lost none of their magic for the tourist, even if you know absolutely nothing about the ancient world.
But if you come with a mind stocked already with the voices of the Romans, the voices of antiquity, it has an extraordinary immediacy.
Farha: So it must be really amazing, after so many years of research, to still be in this process of discovery—unearthing these incredible pieces of history that tell us what Herculaneum was like.
Andrew: That’s absolutely right. It’s quite easy to imagine that we’ve already discovered Pompeii and Herculaneum. So much was done in the period just before the Second World War and just after. There’s a period of really frenetic activity before the war, of course funded by the Fascist government, and after the war funded by special funds to try and solve the problems of poverty in the south of Italy, and so on.
So an enormous amount was done, and it’s very easy to think, “Okay, done that, been there. Surely this is an old story.”
One big change that has happened in the last 20 years, I would say, is that archaeologists have realised that you’ve got to stop digging up new stuff. You can’t just carry on at the same rate as in the postwar years, because it’s creating a gigantic problem of maintenance, and it’s very hard to justify.
And also, you know, you’ve got a limited resource. There only were these two cities destroyed in this very dramatic way and therefore preserved in this very dramatic way. Once we’ve finished digging them up, that’ll be that resource mined out.
So there’s a lot to be said for slowing right down and thinking a bit more about what we’ve already done.
And before I started my project in Herculaneum, I was working on a project in Pompeii. And what we were interested in doing was going back to a bit of Pompeii that was dug up in the 1950s and never even published. They just dug it up and kind of abandoned it.
And we thought, well, you don’t need to dig up new stuff if you haven’t even published the old stuff. And what’s more, if you look at things a bit more carefully with modern scientific technique, you can learn a hell of a lot that they could never have got at in the 1950s.
And that’s what we found in the block of houses we were looking at. There came alive a very vivid story of a house that was basically a bar selling wine. And in the atrium, in the entrance hall of the house, there were 60 amphorae of wine stacked there.
We could even say exactly where they came from: from the island of Crete, which produced a particular kind of sweet white wine that was favoured by Roman women.
And the Roman sources say, you know, women really should avoid drinking wine, except this special wine from Crete. It was probably rather stronger than normal red wine. But anyway, they had loads of it in this shop.
And we found, you know, the amphorae in rather broken condition, with their inscriptions. But also there was the mule, the donkey, that had lugged them up from the port, and a little dog at its feet.
And gradually there emerged not only a very detailed picture of the house as it was at the moment of the eruption, but we were able to go back and look at its prehistory, its earlier history, its gradual development.
And we discovered that the earliest house on that spot dated back to the sixth century BCE. That is seven centuries before the eruption. So that’s a very long history.
So, without causing the conservation problems of doing a new excavation, it was possible to cast a lot of new light within the old excavations.
And I think, as I did that, I became more and more aware of the enormous problems of conservation. And we turned to Herculaneum because of the quite extraordinary opportunity of the Packard Humanities Institute wanting to do a significant project on a Roman site in Italy.
And David Packard asked me, “Where would be a good place to do a project?” And I thought, “Not Pompeii,” because Pompeii is kind of too much in the limelight. Everyone’s looking at Pompeii. Everyone is—I often use the metaphor of vultures circling around the site. If there’s the slightest suspicion of some money to spend, the vultures are there.
And I thought, “No, no, no. Avoid Pompeii.” Anyway, it’s an endless problem.
Herculaneum is a contained site. In Herculaneum, one, you’re out of the public eye, and two, you can do something in the site as excavated as a whole.
It’s only—it’s only, four and a half hectares. What’s that, ten acres or so? It’s—it’s not a big site, though enough to have, what, six city blocks preserved in it. But, but, but Pompeii is ten times that.
And so it’s a contained site with very severe problems, but problems we had a real hope of doing something about.
Farha: Now, tell us about this ancient city of Herculaneum. It was inhabited by about 4,000 people, but it had all the features of a major city. Even though it was smaller and quieter, its surviving remains are every bit as fascinating. So, tell us about Herculaneum.
Andrew: Do you know, I’ve come to doubt the traditional figure of 4,000 inhabitants. I keep on going over the evidence again and again, and I don’t reckon we can even fit 4,000 people inside.
The problem is, we don’t know exactly where the walls ran. But if you assume that the site as excavated is about a quarter of the whole city—and the reason for assuming that is we know a bit about the street grid, and you can see that you have the middle street going east–west and the middle street going north–south—so we’ve got the bottom right-hand corner, so to speak, of the city.
And I have some difficulty in trying to pack 1,000 people into the area excavated. You have to pack them in very densely. And I think it could be 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants inside the city.
So, in our terms, it’s a village. And the more you sort of bring down the population, the more you realize it’s quite extraordinary, in modern terms—it’s no more than a village—to have absolutely knockout public buildings, amazing sculpture and decoration.
Farha: It looks so rich. There are all these fascinating remnants of the city, which you describe in your book—things like fish bones and eggshells. They give us an idea, or at least a glimpse, of what the residents' diets were like 2,000 years ago. Tell us about some of those aspects that are so fascinating.
Andrew: That was a little treat that came to us. One of the principal things we need to do is control water on the site. Most of the damage is done by water, and you need to make sure that water flows down a down-pipe and into a drain, rather than pooling on the floor and then soaking the walls and damaging very valuable frescoes and so on.
So there we were, busy reviving the drainage system of the ancient town. And we knew that there was a major sewer under this very, very big block of houses. But it had been partially explored when it was excavated, and then they kind of gave up because they couldn’t see any point in digging out this great big sewer.
And its full length is, what, 80 metres? And, that’s just the north–south bit. And then there’s another 50 metres going off east–west. So you’ve got a lot of sewer down there.
And we needed to clear it out in order simply to install a pipe to send the water down. But, of course, because our team—the really important thing about this team, which, by the way, is mostly Italians. Our specialists are very much not a group of Anglo-American invaders, but local experts. And Italians have fantastic expertise, both in archaeology and conservation, architecture, and so on.
Anyway, the moment our team saw what the prospect was of opening up this sewer, and saw that at the bottom of the sewer was half a metre of human waste, let us call it, we knew that was going to be archaeologically really exciting.
So we spent a very, very happy three months or so digging out that stuff.
The block of this sewer was actually a very sophisticated bit of sanitary engineering, let’s call it, because every shop and every apartment in the block had its own down-pipe going down into the sewer.
So you’ve got, I think it’s 21 different downpipes linking up to this sewer. And the downpipes are really quite wide, about sort of eight inches diameter. So it meant they could chuck quite a lot of stuff down.
And so it’s not just what comes down the latrine that has been through the human body, but it’s also all their kitchen waste and their bits of broken stuff, broken pots.
And so all the time we were finding two different classes of things: the inorganic objects—bits of broken pottery, bits of glass and bronze and all sorts—and then the organic stuff, the edible stuff.
And there’s enormous richness in all that. You get this amazing snapshot into people’s lives. You know, people sometimes go through other people’s waste bins just to find out about their lives.
Alas, down a sewer you can’t get people’s love letters and so on that you might get in a waste bin. There’s stuff we’re missing, but you learn a lot about the diet.
And we found, for instance, an enormous amount of fish in their diet. That’s not surprising. The town’s right on the sea, and you’d expect the local fishermen to be supplying the local market, and people were eating it.
And we’ve been able to identify something like a couple of dozen different types of fish and a couple of dozen types of shellfish, all in a sample from this sewer that’s one metre by one metre—a tiny sample, but with this incredible richness of material.
Farha: Now, this ancient city was buried under some 70 to 80 feet of material after the volcano erupted. So, in a way, it was protected over the course of two millennia.
That itself is interesting, because it was probably advantageous when you were able to recover all of these objects, including pieces of furniture. A great deal of wood was found in Herculaneum. Tell us about that.
Andrew: Absolutely. It’s important to realize that Herculaneum is destroyed and preserved in a different way from Pompeii.
Pompeii is buried under a blanket of little pebbles of pumice, and that’s incredibly easy to dig through. And everywhere you go in Pompeii, you find holes in the wall. And they’re because, even in antiquity, people were going down to find stuff, just digging tunnels through the houses—bang, straight through the walls of the houses, and on and on—in the hopes of finding something.
So Pompeii is badly disturbed and badly robbed out. And that’s a slightly surprising finding, because people expect Pompeii to be like the Mary Celeste, everything left in place from their last meal.
Oh, no. It’s terribly, terribly disturbed.
Herculaneum is much more Mary Celeste-like, because the glowing clouds of the pyroclastic surges are set in ash. This sets into solid rock, and it’s incredibly hard. Well, you can tunnel through it, but you’re tunnelling through rock.
And they did tunnel through it before the archaeology. We have found tunnels, and we found that they were busy tunnelling in the Middle Ages, for instance. So, yes, people were down there, but not nearly so easily as at Pompeii.
So it’s much less disturbed. And at the same time, this ash setting into rock sets around woodwork, and it carbonizes it, so that as you excavate, you find entire doors, window shutters, beams, and glorious bits of furniture.
A baby’s cradle, a little wardrobe in the bedroom—you can see exactly how it’s made. And it’s got a little shrine at the top, and you keep your household gods in it, and your precious objects, and so on.
And, you know, you get this sort of stuff in Egypt, paradoxically, because it’s so dry in Egypt it’s preserved. You get a bit of woodwork from Egypt, but Herculaneum actually gives you the best furniture surviving from the Roman world. Fantastic stuff.
Farha: So, really, the site has given you the opportunity to study its art and its culture in their original environment. That’s amazing.
Andrew: Yeah.
Farha: To think that you could be standing in one of the rooms of this ancient city.
Andrew: Oh, yes, absolutely. You’re in the room with the original objects. And so you would expect it all to be incredibly legible. You’ve wandered onto a film set, and there everything is still there.
But, of course, they are so different from us. For me, this is one of the principal fascinations, that our expectations of how people lived are defeated.
I think that the most important single thing is slavery. Slavery was extremely common. I guess that at least half the population were slaves, and it may well be more than that.
And you can imagine how different a family setup is if slaves are absolutely normal. So you very much don’t have the nuclear family of parents and children. You get a much more complex setup.
And slaves could be freed and have set up their own families. And you get names being passed on from generation to generation, not father to son, but master to slave, who becomes a master to slave, who then becomes a master to slave.
It’s such a different world.
One of, to me, the most fascinating bits of evidence were skeletons. And we’re only on the edge of understanding what can be extracted from the skeletons.
There’s something like 400 skeletons excavated to date from the site. And it’s absolutely standard in archaeology that you can extract information about age, sex, medical condition, and so on.
But nowadays, techniques are getting very sophisticated. And, in particular, you can examine the teeth, and you can tell the origin of the water that the ten-year-old was drinking as the teeth formed.
And if you’ve got a society where a lot of them are slaves, bought on the slave market, may come from anywhere in the Mediterranean, it becomes really interesting to ask, “What water were these people drinking?”
Are they all locals, drinking the very distinctive local water of Herculaneum, which has got a lot of fluoride in it—in the volcanic region—or do they come from the rest of the world?
And that’s a big project that some of my colleagues are just beginning to work on. And I think we’re going to, in years to come, discover so much more about the population of this site.
Farha: This is all fascinating.
I have to say, it was such a pleasure to read about what you and your team have been doing, but also to think that I’m optimistic—and I’m sure you are as well—that these places will be conserved and preserved for the future.
Andrew: Of course, I share your optimism, but not without struggle, let me tell you. It’s not easy.
Farha: You’re absolutely right. Thank you, Andrew. It was such a pleasure to have you.
Andrew: Thank you very much for having me.
Farha: I’ve just been speaking with Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, who is the Cecil H. and Ida Green Visiting Professor at Green College.
For more information about his research and the Herculaneum Conservation Project, please visit www.herculaneum.org.
I’m going to end today’s show with the theme song, “Up Pompeii.”
Further Reading and Viewing
The Herculaneum Conservation Project — University of Cambridge
An introduction to the conservation and research project that Professor Wallace-Hadrill directed from 2001 to 2016.
The Other Pompeii: Life and Death in Herculaneum — BBC Programme Index
Professor Wallace-Hadrill’s BBC documentary exploring the lives of the people who inhabited Herculaneum before the eruption of Vesuvius.
The Idea of the City in Late Antiquity — Cambridge University Press
Professor Wallace-Hadrill’s most recent book, published in 2025, examining how ancient cities adapted and remained significant after the end of Roman imperial rule in the West.