Proposal for a University of Akron Summer Faculty Fellowship, 2004

Fancy Countertops at Sleazy Snackbars:

Unexpected Evidence for the Roman Marble Trade from Pompeii’s Streetside Shops

The Roman trade in imported marble was important: economically, because it involved tens of thousands of workers and merchants; ideologically, because the emperors decorated their signature buildings with marbles having complex associations with conquest and rule; and aesthetically, because Romans down the social ladder tried to imitate the styles sanctioned by their betters, starting with the imperial court.

Studying the top of the social pyramid is relatively easy because the elite has left us conspicuous ruins, and its doings attracted the attention of many writers. When we move away from Rome and other big cities, we have to depend more on archaeology for evidence in the absence of extensive written sources. Archaeology is good at revealing ordinary lives in the longe durrée but generally poor at showing us a defined moment in time. But a new source of evidence from Pompeii gives us such a view within the framework of a decade and half.

The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in August of AD 79 is famous, but equally important in Pompeian archaeology is the devastating earthquake of AD 62. The earthquake damaged or destroyed most public buildings, and many houses were emptied for some time while being renovated (some were abandoned). It is generally easy to identify earthquake damage and repairs, and since this period was terminated violently in AD 79, trends, styles and design innovations within it are securely and narrowly dated. Streetside shops (bars, in the modern Italian sense) selling wine and snacks appear to have been almost universally reworked in the post-earthquake period, and they offer evidence for marble imports and trends in use which has never been exploited.

Bars were frequent in Roman cities where mobile populations often did not return home until nightfall, and kitchens in all but the wealthiest houses were very basic anyhow. One hundred fifty bars have been identified at Pompeii (there are maybe another 20 at Herculaneum). A regular feature of these shops is that the countertops and fronts are made of fragments of marble set to produce a "sampler" of marbles in different colors and patterns, a humble precursor of Florentine tables from the Renaissance onward. These surfaces were intended, I contend, to give an air of "class" to a kind of eating establishment considered suspect, especially if open after dark (laws against assault and rape did not apply to bar waitresses because they were held to be indistinguishable from prostitutes). Fancy marble counters tried to offset this seamy reputation by displaying marbles otherwise seen only in respectable public buildings or in wealthy houses (illustration below). Some shops did it better than others, but at best they tried to include imported polychrome marbles made famous by the imperial court and, beyond that, to represent as many varieties of marble as possible.

Pompeii in general was not rich enough to make extensive use of marbles other than the most ordinary. But many of the marbles seen in shop counters are of the most prized varieties. The answer to this apparent paradox is not that the shops were wealthy establishments (they were the opposite), but that the marble they bought was debris, from two likely sources.

One source is the rubbish bins of marble workshops; pieces trimmed off or broken during working were usually too small to use in new objects like tables or fountains, but could be reused as surfacing where only one face was exposed. Most of the pieces that are flat with no detail probably resulted from the operations of workshops preparing standard cladding for walls and floors. This use was probably the last commercial opportunity for this waste (as powering marble to make acid-free paper is today). These workshops were not necessarily all local but may have included those in larger cities in the region, Capua and Puteoli (a port as important as the port of Naples today).

But workshop debris is an unlikely source for another component of counter surfaces, fragmentary architectural elements such as moldings, entablatures and columns (sliced into discs; see illustration below). Since these appear to be fully finished, they are more likely to have come from buildings that were damaged by the earthquake. The regular presence of marble fragments as caementa (heavy aggregate in concrete) in post-earthquake walls is indirect support for this inference.

The goal of this project is to enlarge our knowledge of marble use in its social context. Pompeii and its sister city Herculaneum provide a unique sample within well defined chronological limits, and since they were typical towns, results from them are generalizable across 1st century Italy. Specifically, for summer 2004 I have defined three objectives:

1. To survey, document, and identify marble pieces used in shop countertops and fronts. This database will serve as a broad index of the marble market in the middle third of the 1st century, since we can expect that workshop waste plus building debris should encompass every kind of marble being imported to Italy in this period. The trade was substantial; my guess is several dozen varieties will be documented, and so it will be useful to be able to be specific. This survey will also provide the database for the two next objectives.

2. To quantify and categorize reused architectural elements (see illustation below). Since recent archaeological publications (e.g. Morselli 1989) provide baseline data on architectural elements in well documented buildings, it may well be possible to go further to suggest the kind of buildings from which the fragments came. This holds out the exciting prospect of being able to say something about marble use in public buildings in the generation before the earthquake, which is poorly represented today in the archaeological record.

3. To test a hypothesis about the siting of food shops. Here I will be collaborating with Steven Ellis of the Anglo-American Pompeii Project who is completing a dissertation at the University of Sidney on streetside shops. Ellis argues that preferred locations were busy through-streets with heavy pedestrian traffic, and that crossroads of major through-streets were prime. One would expect bars at better locations to be more sumptuously decorated than backstreet ones if in fact decorative marble countertops were considered desirable features. Using a scale of luxuriousness of varieties derived from my earlier work, I will compare five bars picked by Ellis at major intersections with five on minor streets. A positive correlation of location and luxuriousness will strengthen both of our core arguments.

No study has concentrated on Pompeii’s datable sample of the marble market. Bruno 2002 has done an interesting study of marbles used in the rebuilding of a large temple. This tells us a lot about Pompeii’s recovery from the earthquake but little about private taste or about the marble market in general. P. Jongste’s 1995 dissertation, using the database of the British School at Rome’s South Etruria Survey, produced a valuable table of marbles used in datable villas. This is valuable evidence for the tastes of the rich, the very rich, and the super rich, but the shops can tell us about ostentation at the bottom of the social ladder, a valuable contribution to social history alongside Wallace Hadrill’s (1992) discussion of wall painting in modest houses. If we can establish a correspondence between favored locations of shops and better marbles in the counters, this will be a striking evidence for the prestige value of marble and for the ability of owners at higher-traffic spots to spend more on decoration. Finally, any light that the architectural fragments can shed on the decoration of public buildings before the earthquake will be a notable contribution to Pompeii’s architectural history.

I will spend about four weeks at Pompeii in June of 2004. Two preliminary tasks will be done first. Combining the lists of food shops assembled by Eschebach (1993) with shops newly identified by Ellis, I will make a preliminary selection of about 50 bars in representative locations based on the literature. I will also set up an appropriate database for field recording.

On site, I will vet the list of with the aim of ending up with to at least 30 bars in good enough condition to examine in detail. One major difficulty at Pompeii will now have to be confronted: until recently the Archaeological Superintendency restored buildings with more regard for appearance than accuracy, but always with great skill, so that appearances can be treacherous. Hence I will have to qualify my sample of shops by excluding any surfaces restored with modern marble scraps or even with ancient ones from unknown contexts. I can check recent conservation history in the archives of the Superintendency and draw on oral tradition in the form of helpful senior site technicians. Finally, I will return to Rome for a day or two to check the notebooks of Tatiana Warsher, an excellent if eccentric Pompeii scholar who took thousands of Brownie photographs in the 1920s and lovingly pasted them into dozens of scrapbooks, including a series devoted entirely to marble objects and uses. Each photograph is labelled accurately and in detail, making her books an invaluable visual record of the state of the site in the early 20th century. Warsher’s manuscript exists in a single copy at the Swedish School at Rome.

At this point intensive survey of the selected shops will begin. I will have two students helping with this phase. They will be supported by department endowment funds for internships; since they have been awarded preliminary internships for research and training this academic year, I am confident that they will be funded for the summer also. We will document each target bar, numbering each surface with marble paving, and then record each piece of marble with digital photographs and measurements. We will try to identify each piece of marble on site; for colored marbles this can be done by eye, backed by a good reference volume (Borghini 1989). At our field lab (an apartment in the nearby Vico Equense) we will process the photographs and enter the data gathered daily into the database. Data collected will include location, marble type, original use of fragment (i.e., paving, wall cladding, architectural element, etc.), dimensions, and photograph. Although white marbles cannot be reliably identified by eye, it is reasonable to select two or three possibilities for database on the basis of grain size (easily measured with a hand lens) and color cast (compared with standard color charts). But for definitive analysis, scientific analysis is needed. Since this is costly, we will select two or three representative counters made chiefly of white marble scraps and sample every constituent fragment for isotopic and petrofabric analysis. I will hand the sampling over to Lorenzo Lazzarini, director of the Laboratory for the Analysis of Ancient Materials, University Institute of Architecture at Venice and a regular collaborator (Fant 2002). Lazzarini works regularly for the Superintendency, and so it is easy for him to obtain the permission, take the samples I have identified, and process the results (for many reasons it is also better practice for a geologist to take the actual samples). Complete sampling of several counters’ worth of white marbles should provide a good idea of white marble use in general.

After a month of fieldwork building the database, I will devote another full month in the summer to analysis. The first task is to develop the broad picture of the marble market by querying the database about marble types, frequencies and concentrations. I expect that the number of types represented will be much larger than seen in public architecture, where the large quantities needed and required structural properties typically dictate one or at most two marble types, or in domestic architecture, where cost and limited supply drastically restrict marble used to a narrow range. I am guessing that 40 to 60 varieties will appear, suggesting a huge demand and a broad range of imports from numerous sources.

Studying the architectural elements, objective 2, will take library work once home; since volumes on architectural studies and excavations reports are usually folio size and not lent, I will need at least one overnight trip to the major library at the University of Cincinnati. What the architectural elements will yield is hard to predict. At the least, we should be able to say whether they were considered desirable additions to a bar countertop (if they appear at bars that are otherwise well equipped), whether they were easily obtainable (if they appear in most bars), or whether they were quite perhaps rare.

On the final point, I believe that we will be able to substantiate the luxuriousness-location hypothesis with a clear correlation between the bar’s location and the use of fancier marbles.

Several articles will result from this work. The database and general conclusions about the overall marble market will be published in the inaugural volume of Marmora, an International Journal for the Archaeology, History and Archaeometry of Marbles and Stones, of which I am on the editorial board. Another article on the architectural elements will be sent to the Journal of Roman Archaeology. Unless the results are unexpectedly disappointing on objective 3, the luxuriousness-location idea, Ellis and I will coauthor a piece in a mutually agreeable journal. In addition, I see now that it would be desirable to gather my studies on Pompeii together in a volume some time in the future.

It is hard to predict presentations, but I have given four conference papers and two invited lectures so far on the results of my 1999 UA Summer Fellowship work.

I have worked periodically at Pompeii and Herculaneum since 1991-2, when I was in Rome for the year. I have held many permits to enter restricted parts of the site, and with L. Lazzarini I obtained a permit in 1999 to sample several dozen marble objects (we are presently planning another campaign). The bars project needs little special access since most of the shops are in the unrestricted part of the sites, and I am confident that permissions to closed areas can be obtained as needed. The permit for taking samples of the countertops will be handled by Lazzarini.

The Roman marble trade is my special area of interest, and I am one of the senior scholars in this area in the Anglo-European world (in a major Italian volume recently, my work in the bibliography takes up half a page: De Nucio 2002). I read all the research languages necessary (French, German, Spanish, Latin, ancient Greek, some modern Greek and Turkish). I am fluent in Italian and have lived in Italy for a total of seven years. I am a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and have been Visiting Scholar at the British School at Rome.

J.-P. Adam, 1994 (1989). Roman Building. Materials and Techniques. London (Paris).

E. Borghini., 1989. Marmi Antichi. Rome.

M. Bruno et al., 2002. "Pompeii after the AD 62 earthquake: historical, isotopic, and petrographic studies of quarry blocks in the Temple of Venus," in J. J. Herrmann ed., Interdisciplinary Studies on Ancient Stone. London. 282-288.

M. De Nuccio and L. Ungaro, I Marmi Colorati della Roma Imperiale. Rome.

H. Drerup, 1957. Zur Ausstatungsluxus in der römischen Architektur. Münster.

S. Ellis, 2004. "The Pompeian Bar: archaeology and the role of good and drink outlets in an ancient community," Food and History 2.

L. Eschebach, J. Mueller-Trollius, H. Eschebach, Gebåudevezeichnis und Stadtplan der antiken Stadt Pompeji. Cologne 1993.

J. C. Fant et al., 2002. "White Marble at Pompeii: Sampling the House of the Vettii," in L. Lazzarini ed., ASMOSIA VI Interdisciplinary Studies on Ancient Stone. Padova: 307-315.

J. C. Fant, 2004 ( expected). "Imported Marble at Pompeii, Real and Painted Imitation," in J. J. Dobbins and P. Foss eds., Pompeii and the ancient settlements under Vesuvius. London.

V. Gassner, 1986. Die Kauflåden in Pompeii. Dissertaton, Vienna.

P. Jongste, 1995. Het Gebruik van Marmer in de romeinse Samenleving. Dissertation, Leiden.

E. La Rocca, 1986. "Lusso comme espressione di potere" in M. Cima & E. La Rocca eds., Le tranquille dimore degli dei. Venice: 3-35.

R. Laurence, 1992. Roman Pompeii: Space and Society. London.

L. Moens et al., 1990. "Scientific Provenance Determination of Ancient White Marble Sculptures Using Petrographic, Chemical and Isotopic Data," in Marble: Art Historical and Scientific Perspectives on Ancient Sculpture. Malibu: 111-124.

Ch. Morselli et al., 1989. Curia, Forum Iulium, Forum Transitorium. Rome.

N. Neuerberg, 1965. L'architettura delle fontane e dei ninfei nell' Italia antica. Memorie dell'Accademia di Archeologia, Lettere e Belle Arti, V, Naples.

J. Packer, 1978. "Inns at Pompeii: a short survey," Chronache Pompeiane 4: 5-53.

E. Pernice, 1932. Hellenistische Tische, Zisternmünde, Beckenuntersäetze, Altäre und Truhen (Die hellenistische Kunst in Pompeji, Bd. V). Berlin/Leipzig.

A. W. Wallace-Hadrill, 1994. Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton.

Not applicable

My last summer grant from this committee, "Taste and Ostentation in White Marble at Roman Pompeii" (FRG # 1435), led to a successful application to the American Philosophical Society for a research grant of $4400 (July 1999), which enabled me to expand the list of objects sampled and meet extra travel and research costs. A second phase of this work has been supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation (June 2003, $2500). Research results have been presented at the VII International Meeting of the Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity (Thasos, Greece, September 2003) and at the XVI International Congress of Classical Archaeology (Boston, August 2003). A paper on the Vettii sampling campaign is now published (Fant 2002), and one on the second house will come out in the Thasos proceedings. I expect to expand on both papers in a larger interpretive study in the next year.

An earlier Summer Fellowship, FRG #1306 for 1995, led to an Ohio Humanities Council Grant ($3000), in June 2000 for "Pompeii on your desktop: Roman culture through digital media." Less directly, my work led to my being named a Society Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America (1996-2002); in this position I gave three lectures a year around the country to academic groups.

To support the entire costs of a month at Pompeii for the "Sleazy Bars and Fancy Countertops" project, in addition to the time freed by the UA Summer Fellowship if successful, I will be applying also for a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society (up to $6000). I have recently held an American Philosophical Society Research Grant (1999), and so I hope that the Society will be receptive to a new project in an area related to one previously supported.

Department of Classical Studies, Anthropology and Archaeology

Education

Ph. D., Classical Studies, The University of Michigan, 1976. B. A., Classics (Honors) and History, Williams College, 1969. Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies, Rome, 1968

Roman archaeology and architecture; Roman social and economic history

Professor (2003--), Assistant to Associate Professor (1984- ), Department of Classical Studies, Anthropology and Archaeology, The University of Akron.

Visiting Ass’t Professor, Dept. of Classical Studies, University of Michigan, 1981-83.

Classics Instructor, St. Stephen's School, Rome, 1979-81.

Instructor and Ass’t Professor, Departments of Greek and Latin, Wellesley College, 1974-79

Samuel H. Kress Foundation grant ($2500), "Pompeii White Marbles Project," June 2003

Ohio Humanities Council Grant ($3000), June 2000, "Pompeii on your desktop: Roman culture through digital media"

American Philosophical Society Research Grant ($4400), "Taste and White Marble at Pompeii,"1999

University of Akron Summer Faculty Fellowship "Sampling the House of the Vettii, Pompeii," FRG # 1435 ($8000), 1999

NEH Summer Seminar "Spolia, Classical Elements in Medieval Reuse," in Rome, 1993

Rome Prize Fellowship, American Academy in Rome 1991-92

American Philosophical Association Research Grant for research at a Roman marble quarry, Teos, Turkey ($2500), 1986

Samuel H. Kress Foundation grant for a colloquium ("Marble Quarrying in the Roman World," at the 1987 Archaeological Institute of America meetings ($3200), 1986

"Imported Marble at Pompeii, Real and Painted Imitation," in J. J. Dobbins and P. Foss eds., Pompeii and the ancient settlements under Vesuvius. London 2004 ( expected).

With Cancelliere S., Lazzarini L., Preite Martinez M., Turi B.,"White Marble at Pompeii: Sampling the House of the Vettii," in L. Lazzarini ed., ASMOSIA VI Interdisciplinary Studies on Ancient Stone. Padova 2002: 309-316.

"Rome’s marble yards," Journal of Roman Archaeology 14 (2001) 167-198.

"Augustus and the City of Marble," M. Schvoerer ed., Archeomateriaux, marbres et autres roches. Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity IV Actes de la Iv^ème Conférence Internationale, Bordeaux France, 9-13 cctobre 1995 (Bordeaux 1999) 277-280.

"Ideology, Gift and Trade: A Distribution Model for the Roman Imperial Marbles," in W. V. Harris ed., The Inscribed Economy: Production and Distribution in the Roman Empire (Journal of Roman Archaeology supp. vol. 6 1993) 145-70.

Cavum Antrum Phrygiae: The Organization and Operations of the Roman Imperial Marble Quarries at Docimium (BAR International Series, no. 482, 1989).

Editor, Ancient Marble Quarrying and Trade (BAR International Series no. 453, 1988)

Member of the editorial board, Marmora, an International Journal for the Archaeology, History and Archaeoletry of Marbles and Stones (Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali of Pisa and Rome; Lorenzo Lazzarini, editor in chief).

Recent Conference Papers

"White Marble at Pompeii: Sampling the Casa del bracciale d’Oro," Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity VII, Thasos (Greece), September 2003

"White Marble at Pompeii: the Casa dei Vettii and the Casa del bracciale d’Oro," XVI International Congress of Classical Archaeology, Boston, August 2003

"Proveniencing the Garden Furniture in the House of the Vettii," Archaeological Institute of America 2001 annual meeting, San Diego, January 2001

"Taste and White Marble at Pompeii: Sampling the House of the Vettii," with L. Lazzerini, S. Cancelliere and B. Turi, VIth International Conference of the Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity Conference, Venice, June 2000

"Nero’s Tomb," VI Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity Conference, Venice, June 2000

"Painted Marble at Pompeii and the Roman Marble Trade," Vth International Conference of the Association for the Study of Marble and Other Stones in Antiquity, Boston, June 1998

"From quarry to artifact to social history," Department of Classics Colloquium, Ohio University, October 2003

"Sampling Bourgeois Taste at Pompeii," Mesaros Fund Lecture, Kenyon College, March 2001

"Finto Marmo and Taste at Pompeii," Toledo Society Archaeological Institute of America, February 2000

"Marble at Pompeii,"Interdepartmental Program in Classical Archaeology, University of Michigan, April 1999