Pompeii was reoccupied after its destruction in 79 AD: new traces emerge from the Insula Meridionalis construction site

Pompeii was reoccupied after the eruption of 79 AD . Survivors who had no way to start a new life elsewhere, but likely also homeless people from other places, seeking a place to settle and hoping to find valuable objects, attempted to reoccupy the area devastated by the volcanic event. A precarious and disorganized situation, which saw traces of life resurface in the city of Pompeii, continued until the 5th century, when the area was completely abandoned.

These hypotheses, already advanced in the past, appear to be confirmed by data and evidence emerging from the "Safety, Restoration, and Consolidation of the Insula Meridionalis of Pompeii" project. As published in the E-Journal of the Excavations of Pompeii https://pompeiisites.org/e-journal-degli-scavi-di-pompei/, these are testimonies from people who returned to the site of the disaster and who, at a certain point, began to live permanently among the ruins of the upper floors still emerging from the ash. Thus, life returned to the ancient houses and structures, but the spaces that once occupied the ground floor now became cellars and caves, where fireplaces, ovens, and mills were set up.

Pompeii is estimated to have had at least 20,000 inhabitants in 79 AD, but the percentage of those who lost their lives during the eruption is still debated. Approximately 1,300 victims have been found since excavations began in 1748. With two-thirds of the ancient city unearthed, the figure might seem relatively low, around 10%. Many others may have lost their lives outside the city center while trying to escape the epicenter of the catastrophe. There were certainly survivors, as inscriptions bearing Pompeian names from other towns in Campania suggest. But evidently not everyone had the means to start a new life elsewhere. This could explain why some residents returned to the destroyed city, of which the upper floors of the buildings could still be glimpsed.

The ancient inhabitants may have been joined by new arrivals, who had nothing to lose. Initially, they lived in a kind of ash desert, but vegetation soon flourished again.

In addition to a place to live, Pompeii offered the possibility of excavating underground, where valuable objects could be found, although occasionally one could stumble upon the body of a decomposing victim.

This somewhat improvised, if not anarchic, situation was perhaps the reason why Emperor Titus sent two former consuls as curators of Campania restituendae: in addition to promoting the refoundation of Pompeii and Herculaneum, they were tasked with caring for the assets of those who had left no heirs and giving them to the "afflicted cities." However, the attempt at refoundation was a failure, as the site never again became the vital center it had been before the eruption. Rather, judging by the archaeological data, it must have been a settlement where people lived in precarious conditions and without the infrastructure and services typical of a Roman city. This did not prevent this form of settlement from continuing until late antiquity, that is, until the 5th century AD, when, perhaps coinciding with another devastating eruption (known as the "Pollena eruption"), it was definitively abandoned.

" The epochal event of the city's destruction in 79 AD has monopolized memory," comments Gabriel Zuchtriegel , director of the site and co-author of the article on the new finds. " In the enthusiasm to reach the levels of 79, with wonderfully preserved frescoes and furnishings still intact, the faint traces of the site's reoccupation were literally removed and often swept away without any documentation. Thanks to the new excavations, the picture is now clearer: post-79 Pompeii re-emerges, less as a city than as a precarious and gray agglomeration, a kind of encampment, a favela among the still recognizable ruins of the Pompeii of old. In these cases, we archaeologists feel like psychologists of memory buried in the earth: we bring out the parts removed from history, and this phenomenon should lead us to a broader reflection on the archaeological unconscious, on everything that is repressed or obliterated or remains hidden, in the shadow of other seemingly more important things ."