Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: The eye-catching marble-clad surfaces of Pompeii's streetside bars have been ignored by scholars, perhaps because of their plebeian character, or the lack of research on the marble trade, or Pompeii's history of undocumented restoration.The latter remains a problem but is perhaps overstated.Archival research validates paving with marble fragments as an ancient practice but no records let us control every bar for overzealous restoration.Nevertheless, occasional notices 1 and early drawings suggest that restoration has been careful, as demonstrable at bars V 4, 7, and VI 10, 1.The University of Akron Sleazy Bars project, directed by J. Clayton Fant, has studied 23 bars with 3,775 pieces of marble and will record the other ca. 25 surviving ones in June 2008.The total absence of republican stones plus evidence of reuse implicate debris from the A.D. 62 earthquake as the source.A "fanciness" index (based on marble type) shows a close correlation with density of foot traffic.This, combined with different treatment of surfaces within bars, further implies that marble from the post-earthquake cleanup was sold, not left for salvage.Finally, the range of imported stones, including ones from Egypt's Eastern Desert, underlines the pervasiveness of the Mediterranean marble trade already in the Julio-Claudian period.This is a preliminary report on a project which began in 2004 with a field campaign of three weeks and continued in 2006 with another week at Pompeii.A third field campaign of the length of the first is planned for summer, 2009.One of the most arresting visual features of the site of Pompeii today is the colorful marble which covers the surfaces of many streetside bars.The guides call them "thermopolium" and offer to make a pretend coffee for their customers.For the life of the city the bars were obviously important.More than 160 bars are known (the basic definition is a service counter open to the street).In a town of perhaps slightly over 10,000 people, even adding thousands who came into town only in daylight, this is still a high proportion of bars per resident and implies that thousands of people found food and drink at them as they circulated about the city 2 .From an interest in the Roman marble trade and in the more humble uses of marble, the bars potentially offer important evidence.Almost half the bars had converted all or some of their surfaces from painted stucco on masonry to marble pieces set into mortar 3 .Of these approximately 50 are well enough preserved to merit detailed study.In 2004, we examined 16, and another 7 in 2006.
Author: J. Clayton Fant
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2126346372