The Pompeii Forum Project, based at the University of Virginia and sponsored by organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a unique interdisciplinary venture to document and interpret the ruins in the forum of Pompeii, the Roman city which was buried by a volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. and has since become a living laboratory of ancient civic planning. John J. Dobbins, a professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Virginia, heads a team of archaeologists, classicists, urban designers, architects, architectural historians, and structural engineers who are studying the remains of the great public buildings to understand Roman urban design and its relationship to the social and technological context of the first century.
The project Web site provides an excellent overview of the many facets of the project and contains information for useful for diverse fields such as archaeology, classical studies, urban and architectural history, and structural design. The site is divided into four main sections (Archival Photographs, Notes for Students and Teachers, On‐Site Instrument Use, and Volcanic/Seismic Structural Response Investigation). A fifth section lists the names and addresses of project members. Each section has its own organization and design, creating, in effect, four separate sites which address different components of the project’s ongoing work at Pompeii.
The Archival Photographs section contains approximately 205 black and white images of rooms, walls, doors, and decorations of the buildings on the east side of the forum. The photographs are saved offline as 6.4 MB TIF images for archival purposes; but they are presented on the Web as more manageable GIF images. Some of the images have either been removed from the site or have not been loaded (especially images of the exterior of the Eumachia building), but most of the photographs are available for online viewing.
The numbered photographs are presented both in tables and in image maps which show where the architectural details are found on the structures. Captions and meter sticks in the photographs document the measurements and exact locations of each fragment. This section of the project sites uses frames, making navigation somewhat awkward and download times occasionally lengthy (especially for users accessing the site using a modem). Archaeologists seeking fully documented images of the excavation sites at Pompeii will get the most use out of these photographs. Other sections of the Pompeii Forum site contain color slides which can supplement the black and white images intended for archival storage.
The Notes for Students and Teachers section developed by Dobbins is the one part of the site that is created for use in classroom settings. Dobbins created these pages with the help of a fellowship from the Virginia Teaching+Technology Initiative Fellowship Program to support his and the other project members’ undergraduate courses. The case studies and five exercises in this section are quite useful for pedagogical purposes. They contain many non‐technical discussions of Pompeiian urban history which explain the project in terms which even secondary school Latin or history students can easily follow (Dobbins notes that a class of eighth‐graders in Kansas are among the site’s frequent visitors).
The exercises are flexible enough to be used in different combinations depending on the type of course and on the needs of the instructor. Dobbins includes English translations of Pliny the Younger’s two letters to the historian Tacitus, the only eyewitness accounts of the city’s destruction, and color images of the most important buildings and houses to provide the necessary historical background. Latin students can use the exercise in which they translate an inscription from one of the buildings and learn how to analyze the function of such dedicatory epitaphs in Roman building design. Other exercises include an analysis of a fresco from one of the houses (this exercise includes many graphical links and discussions of the myth depicted in the fresco) and a tour of the city featuring commentary on the social implications of the urban landscape. These basic exercises are valuable additions to the Web site, for they form an accessible, user‐friendly introduction to the urban history research being undertaken at Pompeii which lower‐level students can appreciate.
The remaining sections of the site include a detailed overview of the survey work carried out in 1996 and an extensive report on the volcanic and seismic tests on the buildings being conducted by the structural engineering group in the project. The On‐Site Instrument Use section gives an account of a single day’s work surveying a section of wall as an example of the project members’ procedures in measuring and recording the dimensions of the site. A helpful glossary of technical terms and notes are included in separate windows which the viewer can pull up while reading the main text.
The Volcanic/Seismic Structural Response Investigation section describes how structural engineering principles bear on the archaeological questions concerning the reconstruction of the Pompeiian forum following an earthquake in 62 A.D. The researchers are testing the hypothesis that the forum and surrounding portion of the city were extensively redesigned between the time of the earthquake and the subsequent eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The report also includes images, bibliographic references, and even MPEG animated sequences in separate windows to preserve the continuity of the argument. These sections are most useful to those seeking sophisticated archaeological and architectural analyses of the city as well as geological examinations of the volcanic forces which inundated the city.
The chief limitation of the Pompeii Forum Project Web site is the lack of links from the various sections back to the project’s home page, making navigation from one section to another or within the hierarchy of the different sections rather cumbersome. The sections thus stand in isolation from each other; and the user could potentially lose sight of the overall mission of the project or of the other important facets of the project’s studies. The site does, nevertheless, give researchers, scientists, instructors, as well as advanced and lower‐level students an excellent introduction to the advanced archaeological techniques being applied at Pompeii. It also offers extensive commentary on the complex relationship between city and culture in the Roman world. The site is one of the few resources on the Web devoted to ancient archaeology, urban history, and cultural studies and, as such, will appeal to users in a wide array of disciplines.
