DIRECTIONS: Ordinary life rarely survives. Read how a few accidents kept it.
The place
What stopped the decay
What we got
Pompeii and Herculaneum
a volcano buried a whole town in an afternoon
ordinary streets, shops, kitchens, graffiti on the walls — a town caught doing nothing special
Vindolanda (a Roman fort in the north of Britain)
waterlogged ground with no air in it, so wood and leather did not rot
thin wooden writing tablets: soldiers’ letters, a request for more socks, and an invitation to a birthday party
Bogs and ice
cold, acid or airless conditions
bodies, clothes, food in a stomach — the sort of thing that survives nowhere else at all
Very dry deserts
nothing has enough water in it to rot
paper, cloth, seeds, whole documents thrown away as rubbish
Now put sheet 10 beside this. A vast empire lasted centuries and covered three continents, and a great deal of what we know about how ordinary people in it actually lived comes from a town killed by a volcano and a wet fort at the edge of it.
That is not a criticism of anybody. It is a measurement of how thin the evidence is — and the reason a request for socks is treated as treasure.
Every place in the table is an accident of conditions. Say what that means about the parts of the world we know least about.
A Volcano and a Wet Fort — What Follows
What survived · Page 2 of 2
A letter asking for socks is more useful to a historian than another carved royal name. Say why.
Pompeii is one town on one day. Say one thing you could safely conclude from it about the whole empire — and one thing you could not.