I am finishing (I hope) an article today – for a book on labour in the Roman world, and I am looking at the way in which the spatial context in which work took place might (or might not) have had an impact on the social and economic world of those spending their days in shops and workshops. In summary, there are two important things to keep in mind when looking at labour in the Roman world from this perspective. In the first place, everyday work became very much publicly visible: many people operating shops and workshops were doing so in plain sight of the urban community, which led to a vivid discours in which people negotiated their social status on the basis of a strongly defined occupational identity. This was much stronger in the Roman world than had been the case earlier on. Second – and this is in my eyes the ‘big’ story – you see at the same time a development of large scale work environments that look more like factories than like workshops.
At some point I am arguing that at Pompeii, some of the houses with a workshop are really very tiny, which suggests that the people living in them were not very wealthy and probably were unable to maintain a large staff of workers alongside their own family. In other words: they are likely to have participated actively in the work on the shop floor on an everyday basis – as opposed to the classic picture in which the wealthy houseowner spends his day on the form, while his slaves did the work in the workshop. A good example of this could be house VI 14, 33-34 at Pompeii, which has a bakery that in size is as large as the house itself: the house basically consists of an atrium, two cubicula, a tablinum and a triclinium, and that’s it. The rest of the complex is devoted to milling grain, and making bread. Ideally, however, you want to base yourself on more than architecture alone: it cannot be excluded that this house lost its domestic function and was just used as a bakery. So, I went back to the excavation reports, and checked whether the excavators back in 1876 had found anything that might suggest that this was, in 79 AD, an inhabited house.
To be honest, I had read the excavation reports some years ago, and I had remembered that in the triclinium (number c on the map, and the room to the right on the picture), excavators had found large quantities of objects that were unrelated to the baking process and pointed to a non-productive use. While I was writing it down for publication I wanted to double-check whether my memory was right. It was, sort of, but rereading the excavation report also was worrying: how reliable was it, actually? The thing that I had previously overlooked was that this was a so-called ‘scavo straordinario’ – two words that should ring alarm bells with anyone reading Pompeii’s excavation reports. A ‘scavo straordinario’ is something that was organized when an important visitor arrived at the excavation: for the occasion, one room was selected that was ‘excavated’ in the presence of his or her highness, and if this was a Royal highness, the house was subsequently named after him or her – which is why we have a ‘casa della Regina d’Inghilterra’ and a ‘casa del Principe di Napoli’. In this case – more precisely on 14 september 1877 – the excavations were visited by His Highness the Ambassador of France, who was to witness the ‘excavation’ of the triclinium in the southwest corner of the house.
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There is only one tiny detail: the house was already excavated. A brief description of its layout had been published in the Notizie degli Scavi the preceding year (1876, p. 195). It is possible that the excavation had not yet reached the floor level, but enough was known to describe the remains of the bakery, which are not far above the ground level. In any case, no artifacts had been reported in 1876, which is typical for the period but does not necessarily mean that nothing had been found – it is extremely unlikely that nothing was there. In fact, the only artifacts that were found in this house were found in the triclinium, during the scavo straordinario. This should already raise some eyebrows. But still, it is possible that they had left the last meter of debris in this room for a later occasion – such as that 14th of september in 1877.
Yet, this all becomes highly unlikely if you read very carefully what, actually, was found under the eyes of the ambassador of France. The report gives a long list that goes on for three quarters of a page. This is highly unusual for such a small room. It is also highly unusual that this small room in this small house contains three decorated bronze vases, a decorated box, also of bronze, a balance, several bronze plates, 347 bronze coins, a silver hand mirror, two silver spoons and four small silver coins, ten bottles and cups of glass, some high quality arettine ware, and a whole load of everyday instruments. In other words: this surely is a remarkable discovery, that must have pleased the ambassador.
It is only, probably, fake. That is, it has been observed by others that the scavi straordinari often tend to return more, and more spectacular finds – more metals, more silver, and more gold, and more objects in general. This raises the impression that at least some of the ‘finds’ were buried for the occasion and then – surprise, surprise – ‘discovered’ before the eyes of the visitor. In this case, where we know that the house already mostly had been excavated a year earlier, it is hard to avoid the impression that things were messed up on purpose. Yet, you cannot hide such high-profile discoveries in the presence of Important People from the excavation reports – lest someone discovers. That’s why it is so complicated to read Pompeii’s excavation reports.
What does this mean for my article? Well, basically it means that I have to make do with the architecture, which in itself fortunately is clear enough about the way the house was used – house and workshop were neatly separated, and there clearly was a ‘domestic’ and a ‘productive’ sphere within the building also after the construction of the bakery. So, I stick to my point: this house was most likely inhabited by a small family, who ran the workshop with the aid of, perhaps, one or two others – slaves or wage laborers, we don’t know. But I’ll have to get rid of the idea that the objects found in this house tell us a lot about what happened here. Fortunately, in other houses, things are a bit different. Sometimes.
Miko Flohr, 25/03/2014