📺 Watched Pompeii: The New Dig.
The BBC shows us some days in the lives of an Italian archeology team as they continue the 100+ year effort to uncover what’s under the horrific mess that the eruption of the Mount Vesuvius volcano caused to be rained down upon the city of Pompeii. in the the year 79 AD.
Much of the city, its contents and the physical remains of the poor people who were stuck there at the time has been astonishingly well preserved by virtue of it all being covered by huge layers of ash. There’s been various efforts to unearth it over the years - Wikipedia gives the modern archaeological effort a start date in the 1920s. But the very start of the process could be a lot earlier depending on when you start counting from.
However, over 100 years later, a surprising-to-me amount of it is still buried under the ash, despite the complex now being a popular tourist site. So this new BBC documentary follows a team of Italian archeologists as they excavate a whole new city block.
Discoveries abound; including potentially the world’s first ever known illustration of a pizza no less. Although the i newspaper is not entirely wrong to suggest that, whilst the discoveries themselves are exciting, it is hard at times to translate that thrill to a 3 hour documentary series where most of the work involved in getting to the discoveries consists of people meticulously digging into piles of dirt. Nonetheless, the end product certainly seems to make their toil worthwhile.
I wouldn’t want to include any more find-spoilers here, but for anyone who is interested enough in the topic to want to see what was unearthed, but not interested enough to spend 3 hours watching the process and commentary, the History Extra website lists some of the brightest and best finds. The accompanying BBC site also has some short highlights clips along with links to a virtual tour of Pompeii put together by the Open University, who were also involved in producing this documentary.
