KITCHENS AND DINING ROOMS AT POMPEII ... - Get a Free Blog

simple quantification and percentages; it does not rely on determining 'statistically significant'
results. Statistical significance demands a truly random sample, which is impossible at Pompeii. 2
I am concerned with whether the trends and patterns were socially or culturally significant.
Building categories for comparison
Wallace-Hadrill's work at Pompeii is the only large-scale urban analysis, based on
samples of contiguous insulae, that is comparable to this thesis. He has successfully tracked
features of architecture, decoration and luxury through households of all socio-economic status.
Wallace-Hadrill has categorized buildings in his samples based on the quartile of the size ranking
in which they happened to fall. 3 He has assumed, rightly, that ground area is a rough measure of
a building's function and the wealth of its occupants. However, quartiles based on ground area
are unwieldy analytic tools; they can only mark out the most general trends, because they are
based on an arbitrary, not a natural division of the data (see Table 3.1): 4
Quartile No. of buildings Area (m 2 )
1 58 10.0 - 45.0
2 61 50.0 - 170.0
3 57 175.0 - 345.0
4 58 350.0 - 3000.0
Table 3.1: Wallace-Hadrill's (1994, from Table 4.2) building categories for urban analysis,
based on ground area. Total sample: 234 buildings.
The problem is that all buildings (houses, (work)shops, etc...) are included in a large pool and
categorized only on the basis of ground area. A (work)shop of ca. 60.0 m 2 has far more in
common with a smaller (work)shop of ca. 30.0 m 2 than it does with a small house of ca. 150.0 m 2 .
It is possible to create more coherent categories by using more precise criteria to define sub-
groups in the data. The definitions for the classification which I offer rely on several factors:
function (based on features and finds), plan, ground area, and number of rooms.
This sample is first divided into the following categories, based on function and ground
plan: 1) (work)shops; 2) (work)shop-houses; 3) commercial establishments offering food such as
lunch counters, diners and bakeries (whether independent units or attached to residences); 4)
houses, with or without (work)shops (Table 3.2). Some overlap is inevitable; for instance, a house
2 See chapter two above, pp. 58-59.
3 Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 81, Table 4.2, Fig. 4.11. See also 118-131; Wallace-Hadrill 1991a, 249-264; Wallace-
Hadrill 1991b; Wallace-Hadrill 1991c, 145-170. A 'quartile' is one-fourth the total sample, arranged in order
from smallest building to largest., e.g. the smallest 25% of the sample fall into the lowest quartile.
4 Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 124. He has relied on an extremely objective measure, i.e. ground area, in part as a
reaction against Maiuri's (1958) classification scheme, which was saturated with assumptions about the
social position of the residents in the different classes of houses.
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