Summary of the Proceedings and Papers Presented at - World ...

This exhibition, possible at a time when the excavations
were not yet under siege by mass tourism, remained open
only for a few years due to the fragility of the finds.
The damage caused by changes in temperature and atmospheric
agents, the constant need to maintain the display
cases, the dangers of theft, due in part to the development
of tourism, gradually led to the objects being placed in storage,
and the dismantling of the display cases.
Today only a few of these remain, containing architectural
fragments and plaster work, evidence of an attempt to create
an open-air museum which we might consider recreating
using copies and multimedia displays.
Recording the wall structures
The next step in our study of the houses in the Insula Orientalis
I was an attempt to outline the settlement history of
the insula through an analytical recording of wall structures.
After their discovery, these houses were never studied in
full, but were merely published in descriptive form in Maiuri’s
fundamental 1958 volume on the new excavations.
Our study of wall structures employed the system based
on recording stratigraphic wall units, developed by the Istituto
Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione of the
Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. This system was
modified and refined, and subsequently tested on Insula VI
at Pompeii, thus improving the links between the various elements
in both a hierarchical and horizontal sense. For the
three houses in the Insula Orientalis I we thus compiled information
sheets on each room, wall, aperture, stratigraphic
wall unit and stratigraphic decoration unit. These later came
to form part of information sheets for the domus and insula.
Individual features were then shown on high definition digital
photographs; these, together with the information sheets,
will form part of a database specifically developed for the
project. The database will also contain information sheets
compiled by conservators, and all the information and images
found during our archival research.
The study of wall structures has allowed us to identify
and analyse the individual elements of each wall, creating
a common basis for all the specialists, including architects,
restorers, and archaeologists, who will carry out restoration
work. These information sheets allow each specialist
Herculaneum – The House of the Gem (Ins. Or. I.1), west wall of
room 14; an example of the catalogue of wall structures developed
as part of the work of the Herculaneum Conservation Project.
to instantly and unequivocally identify and define the wall
strata. At the same time, they ensure that during conservation
work, features such as traces of blocked-up doors and
windows, scaffolding holes and superimposed layers of brick
or plasterwork, which may be important for the interpretation
of the monumentís history, are not lost.
The analysis of wall structures has also been of fundamental
importance in outlining a preliminary history of the
transformations that the buildings in this insula have undergone.
A reading of the elevations has already allowed us to
reconstruct various different phases, characterized by the
rebuilding, enlargement, and unification of the residential
complexes, which appear to be centred on the House of
the Telephus Relief, the most significant element in all the
phases of the insula’s history.
This analytical interpretation has opened up numerous
new lines of research which will be pursued in depth with a
series of archaeological test pits. It is hoped that these will
confirm our interpretation of the elevations, and provide new
data on the most ancient phases of inhabitation in this area.
12 A. MAIURI, Ercolano, I nuovi scavi (1927-1958), Roma 1958, pp. 336-360.
13 The system developed by Dott.ssa Maria Paola Guidobaldi and Prof.
Fabrizio Pesando for the study of elevations at Pompeii is currently
being used for research in the Regio VI at Pompeii by the universities of
Perugia, Napoli “Orientale”, Trieste and Venezia. See M.P. Guidobaldi-F.
Pesando, Variazioni di proprietà nell’insula VI,9: indagine nella Casa del
Centauro (VI, 9, 3-5 e 10-12), in Rstpomp. IX, 1998, pp. 217-224.