Unearthing Pompeii
Imagine an eruption
No, no, not like that.
More like this:
The type of eruption that inspired this:
Classical art fans and particularly sharp history buffs already know where I’m going with this but for those who don’t, ever heard of a little explosion that destroyed an entire town, casting it in ash and, in the process, fixed itself on thousands of movie screens hundreds of years after the fact?
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius has captured imaginations for centuries after the dust and rock settled. The great Roman historian Pliny the Younger witness the event, and his recounting of the biblical disaster has inspired dozens of books, films and even video games.
With all this grandeur and mythos surrounding the city and its end, you’re sure to find some acolytes, but none might be as impressive or devoted as Kevin Dicus.
History from the ground up
“It really is seared into the modern imagination. Especially, my gosh, the bodies. When you get something that dramatic, people sit up and take notice.”
Dicus, sipping from a cup of coffee at the appropriately named Roma Cafe, is thousands of miles away from his true home of Pompeii, but I can see the ruins, feel the ash and smell the sea as he describes the process of carving through the lost city.
The bodies he refers to are the thousands of casts made by the flood of superheated ash that swept through Pompeii. This wave of destruction killed everything in its path, while also preserving the huddled, desperate corpses of those it took.
This can make things tricky.
“In Pompeii you’re dealing with an occupational history of 600 or 700 years, right on top of another. Excavation there is unlike anything I’ve ever done. It’s extraordinarily complex.”
Dicus, a graduate of the University of Michigan, is a new teacher at the University of Oregon, building a Roman Classics curriculum at the UO that will (hopefully) be one of the finest in the nation. When we discuss his future plans for his introduction of Pompeii onto unsuspecting Ducks, he gleefully smiles.
“This is what I do.”
And, in a way, he’s been doing it for a long time.
“I was in third grade when I learned about Pompeii. It really is a love affair.”
Somewhere in Dicus’ Colorado upbringing, the seed that was planted by his third grade teacher blossomed, until it became all consuming, and Dicus decided the rest of his life would be spent studying scrolls, dusting off the past and, most importantly, digging through the husk of Pompeii.
“Previously I was working out in the country side in Tuscany which was very nice,” he says, casually mentioning his long months in Rome and the Italian countryside (all completely free of cost for him). But there’s a spark in his eyes that makes it clear that his time in the Mediterranean isn’t a vacation.
Take, for example, Dicus’ work in another town decimated by the eruption: Herculaneum. Here’s a lovely tid-bit over what went down in Pompeii’s sister city, which had the misfortune of being even closer to the eruption. Charles Pellegrino, in his book “Ghosts of Vesuvius,” described the carnage in horrid detail: “skulls were exploded from the inside, by the pressure of vaporizing brain tissue and boiling blood.”
Kevin, who probably tries not to think about that image too hard, prefers to talk about the less gruesome finds of Herculaneum.
“Not much of Herculaneum has been excavated, but what has been is actually much better preserved than Pompeii. You get wood preserved there! At Herculaneum we even found a library with scrolls, with writing. Now these scrolls are carbonized and they’re a real pain to unroll and read the black lettering on the black, now carbonized papyri, but it can be done.”
Still, he returns to Pompeii summer after summer, year after year.
“Once you understand how to dig in Pompeii, I think you can dig anywhere. It is the best training one can get as an archeologist.”
Easy for him to say. For most people, the excavation of Pompeii is probably in a similar league to rocket science, but there’s always that obsession. That grain of thought slid into Dicus’ mind has never left.
“You can walk into the very houses that people were living in two thousand years ago. It really is one of the most immediate ways to experience the ancient world. Sometimes you sit back and you think ‘Wow! This has been hidden for two thousand years.’”
