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POMPEII, Italy — Last morning, in the Porta Sarno necropolis just outside the eastern tip of Pompeii, Mattia Buondonno lifted a protective tarp covering a tomb discovered last year.

According to the inscription on the tomb’s pediment, it was a freed slave named Marcus Venerius Secundio who prospered and “organized four days of Greek and Latin demonstrations.” .

Inside the tomb, believed to date only decades before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that strangled Pompeii in 79 AD, archaeologists have discovered one of the best-preserved skeletons ever found. “Weird for the time. Normally adults would be burned,” Buondonno said.

But the tomb was also important for other reasons.

“Recent finds like this give us new insights into the subclasses of Pompeii,” said Luana Toniolo, a former Pompeii staff archaeologist who has excavated in the area. In particular, an epigraph containing Secundio’s intense biography, which says he was a guardian at the Temple of Venus and trained for the priesthood in a cult, sheds light on some of the professions that freed slaves, he said.

For archaeologists, the tomb inscription was also important as confirmation of a hitherto unconfirmed theory that performances at Pompeii were presented in Greek, the most widely spoken language in the eastern Mediterranean. It was still unclear whether these were musical or theatrical, but they were proof that Pompeii was a cosmopolitan city.

“We know that people from all over the Mediterranean live in Pompeii,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, 40, the site’s administrator. a video about finding. It was an open, multiethnic society, he added.

In the past, visitors flocked to the ancient ruins to see the dazzling frescoes in the majestic dwellings, fascinated by the tragedy of an ancient civilization that had no chance of surviving against the tons of ash, gas, and rock that extinguished life in the city. . But the Italian-German archaeologist Zuchtriegel, who took over Pompeii in 2021, hopes that under his supervision, visitors will get to know the ancient city through a wider lens and explore its complex social stratification.

“Many of the questions we address today are inspired by other fields that have emerged here, such as gender studies and postcolonial studies,” Zuchtriegel said. Said. We must not forget that all the wealth and works of art we see in Pompeii are actually based on a society where not only slavery but also the concept of social welfare was absent.”

Concrete proof of the brutal life enslaved people endure, last year “…Chamber of Slaves” inside Villa in the north of Pompeii. The narrow space contained three cots (the smallest for a child), plus a pot and large jugs, suggesting that its inhabitants lived in what was also a storage area. The room was lit by a small overhead window.

“Sometimes you suddenly get very close to the fact that the vast majority of Pompeii’s inhabitants probably have experienced it,” Zuchtriegel said. “I think it was a very difficult society.”

Zuchtriegel’s checklist for bringing a frozen field in the first century into the 21st has many items to cross out.

“We still need to think about how we can better include people with disabilities, children, people from different cultural backgrounds,” he said. “It’s not just about barrier-free access, it’s also about the language we use and the way we try to describe the site.”

For some, it’s time for these issues to finally come to light. “Archaeologists can often be conservative on the issues they deal with,” said Sarah E. Bond, associate professor of history at the University of Iowa, by phone, but “I’m excited to see some things start to emerge in Pompeii.”

Bond said there has been an increasingly broad shift in scientific research into the ancient world to explore previously overlooked issues such as “things like sexual assault, rape or slavery.” “It’s great to see Italian archaeologists now oversee Pompeii as a museum site, embracing important questions about gender, forced labor and violence in important ways.”

among others discoveries that grab the headlines well preserved in recent years. thermopolyumor the ancient snack bar that sheds light on ancient culinary delights with a soup mix of snails, mutton and fish: “Pompei street food,” Zuchtriegel humorously called it.

A charcoal inscription found on a wall in the atrium in the so-called “House with the Garden”, not far from the Thermopolium, seems to date the eruption of Vesuvius to October instead of the traditionally accepted August. There were already many clues that the explosion was in the fall: traces of pomegranates, fermented wines, hearths in some rooms. “You don’t light a fire in August,” said Nicola Meluziis, a Pompeii site worker.

Most of the work carried out in the last ten years, Great Pompeii Project. This $137 million effort, funded by the European Union, began in 2013 to better protect the site after a building collapsed in 2010, sparking international controversy. about the maintenance there.

“Money was spent and well spent,” Zuchtriegel said, praising his predecessor Massimo Osanna, who oversaw the site during the flow of money before being promoted to oversee all of Italy’s museums. Osanna brought “a tremendous comeback”.

Crediting Osanna for giving Pompeii a strong social media presence, Bond said that includes a face-to-face in Pompeii’s form of communication. During his tenure, Pompeii gained public attention by using Instagram and Twitter to announce discoveries, rather than keeping them secret until they were published in scientific journals, which was the old way of doing things in Italy. “I saw people engaging a whole new generation who had never been to the Pompeii site before,” Bond said. “But they saw it on Instagram and were fascinated.”

Online presence aside for Zuchtriegel, the real challenges to the site are on the ground, exacerbated by climate change, he said, and this has had a measurable impact: The site is now subject to sudden temperature changes from hot to cold and periods of drought. , as well as very heavy rains. “All this adds stress to ancient structures and frescoes and is very worrying,” he said. “There’s a reason why indoor museums normally have air conditioning.”

New technologies, including sensors, thermal imaging cameras and drones, are being introduced in Pompeii to provide data and images that instantly alert staff to potential problems such as moisture in walls or seismic activity.

“The goal is to see in real time what’s really happening,” Zuchtriegel said, so it’s possible to intervene before it’s too late.

Artificial intelligence and robotics are also used bring together Ceiling frescoes of House of Painters at Work, destroyed in a bombing in World War II. (This building, an old house, got its name because one room contained paint pots and brushes.) And 3D laser scanning technology was used for this. make a model A horse skeleton unearthed in 1938 that reconstructs some of its missing parts.

New technologies will play a role in explaining to visitors a restored site on the western edge of the ancient site “Insula Occidentalis”, which consists of several urban villas built on a hillside overlooking the Bay of Naples.

Architect Paolo Mighetto, who led the project, said the brainstorming continues on how we can best make the area alive for the public, perhaps using holograms or some form of interactive lighting. “We are considering different solutions,” he said. (already have a Pompeii app people can download to their smartphones and get information about buildings by scanning the QR codes throughout the site.)

A villa in the area, the so-called Library House, offers particularly interesting “treasure chests” of material, Mighetto said. It gives a comprehensive sense of the upheavals of nearly 2,000 years, including a major earthquake in 62 AD; eruption of Mount Vesuvius; The first excavation of Pompeii in the 18th century, during which underground tunnels were dug under the building; and deformations caused by WWII bombs.

“We see traces of successive events over time,” Mighetto said. “Our challenge is to allow visitors to see traces of these catastrophic events through the wall’s lesions, cracks and deformations so that they can “better understand the drama of the past” using these new technologies.

In a way, Pompeii has always been a trend-setting site.

“Not just for archeology, but restoration techniques and making archeology accessible to the public,” said Zuchtriegel. “And that had a huge impact.”