Excavating History in Pompeii’s Ancients Gardens

Drawing: Yaniv Korman, with permission

Sketch depicting the perspective of an ancient viewer standing in the center of the garden, gazing toward the southeast corner of the planted space and observing gardeners at work. 

Beneath the shade of pine and myrtle, researchers from the Casa della Regina Carolina Excavation (Cornell University; Bologna University; Harvard University) in Pompeii, Italy were hard at work again this summer. One of the project’s main goals this year was to further uncover the ancient garden that was once planted and maintained by the Roman inhabitants. 

Although the violent and extreme nature of Pompeii’s preservation may make it seem unlikely that much in the way of plant material or evidence of garden activity would have survived, experts like Dr. Jessie Feito* (Institut Català d'Arqueologia Clàssica, Spain) and Dr. Kaja Tally-Schumacher** (Harvard University) are helping to recreate not only the garden itself but the lives of those who worked to maintain it. 

Through archaeobotanical methods– the study of ancient plant matter through microscopic (e.g. pollen) and macroscopic (e.g. seeds) means– the team at CRC has been able to recreate many aspects of the ancient garden so far. “People have been using archaeobotanical methods more in recent years, because you can get a feel for a lot more aspects about a site,” explains Dr. Feito, CRC’s resident archaeobotanist. “We can see not only the activities that were being done, what was being planted, but also what was being eaten.” 

Musée d’Archéologie Nationale

A floor mosaic from Saint-Romain-en-Gal showing two orchard or garden laborers harvesting fruit. 

Dr. Feito recreates these activity pathways by examining soil from the excavated garden layers through a process called flotation wherein sampled soil is poured into a multi-chamber water reservoir or simply a bucket. Heavier soil particles sink to the bottom of the reservoir, and lighter plant materials float to the top and down into a collection screen. From there, they are dried, analyzed, and categorized. In this way, Dr. Feito can identify what plants and plant families are represented in the garden soil and how they were preserved. The presence of certain plants and the means of their depositions allow the reconstruction of the past “human-environment interactions” that interest both Dr. Feito and Dr. Tally-Schumacher. 

For Dr. Feito, one of her main interests concerns plants as food and markers of cultural change. “Plants are fundamental here,” says Dr. Feito. “They’re the center of not only the diet but the economy. Food is at once individual and universal. People express their identities with food, but they also have to eat. It is also something subject to trends and changes and, particularly in the ancient world, when people come into contact with new populations, you see the introduction of new seeds, food plants, and eating patterns. You can literally see evidence in the archaeobotanical record of cultural contact.”

This intersection of plants and people, trade and change is also critical to Dr. Tally-Schumacher’s work, and the timing of Pompeii’s destruction itself is particularly key to her studies on gardening, agricultural knowledge, and climate history

Beginning around 200 BCE up until about 150 CE, the Mediterranean entered what has been dubbed “the Roman climate optimum” wherein weather conditions were unusually moist, warm, and stable contrary to the previous period of cooler, drier conditions. It is exactly during this period that the Roman Republic, and later Empire, expanded exponentially to encompass its largest physical extent of around 1.9 million square miles and roughly 70 million inhabitants. 

Drawing: Yaniv Korman, with permission

Artistic reconstruction of strollers and gardeners at work in the Casa della Regina Carolina garden. Dr. Tally-Schumacher’s work argues that the majority of garden laborers would have been enslaved individuals. 

As Dr. Tally-Schumacher explains, “If you have more favorable conditions, you can grow more grain to feed a larger army which means more conquest and more expansion, more trade, wider networks, more movement, and more enslavement. People are moving and plants, too, are moving.” 

It was not only the plants and people that were suddenly moving far and wide, but crucially also with them, knowledge. “During this time there is an incredible horticultural revolution,” says Dr. Tally-Schumacher. “We have new terminology, new and different types of gardeners, new categories; new words are created to describe them all. It really illustrates the specialization and growth that defines this period.”

Dr. Feito’s analyses, for example, have identified a range of plants present in the garden from ornamental species, such as floral species, to food-producing ones such as grape, walnut, and olive. This range helps us not only reconstruct what the garden may have looked like but also allows us to say something about the specialized knowledge required for its upkeep. As Dr. Feito explains, “Different plants require different techniques to grow and maintain them.”

WikiCommons

An example of a modern garden reconstruction at the House of the Vettii, Pompeii, Italy. License

By speaking with modern gardeners at historic Italian castles and villas, Dr. Tally-Schumacher has found surprising ways in which Roman gardeners were diverse in their specializations as well as their innovation with the care of their plants.

Roman planting pots, for instance, were planted beneath the ancient garden surface together with the root ball of the plants they contained. This is quite contrary to how we use planting pots today. However, gardeners who maintain the 16th century gardens at the Villa D’Este just outside of Rome have noted that this would have served a rather clever way of not only dwarfing larger plant species by restricting root growth, but also as a means of water conservation. 

Water poured directly at the base of the plant was more likely to trickle down into the pot beneath the surface and stay with the intended plant, rather than pool out as waste or nourish unwanted garden weeds. Dr. Tally-Schumacher notes how these ancient techniques may also find purchase with our climate challenges today.

Danielle Vander Horst, with permissions

A Roman flower pot recovered from the CRC Excavation. 1st century CE. The pot would have been planted in the ground along with the plant it contained, contrary to modern practices.

Despite these seemingly positive markers of growth and efficiency, Dr. Tally-Schumacher also highlights the darker sides of how knowledge specialization was commodified and controlled even in antiquity. “By and large, most of these gardeners and specialists were enslaved.” Whether at the state or city level, or by individual families, the expertise of these gardeners was likely not considered their own. “The texts that we have are written by the slave owners who are taking on the labor of these enslaved individuals, they’re not doing the work themselves and do not possess this knowledge, but it would have been fashionable among the elite classes to be well informed about how to manage one’s estate.” 

Funerary evidence has allowed us to name some gardeners from the Roman period, especially those who worked as topiarii or landscape architects, however, like much of our evidence about the lives of the enslaved, there is much we still do not know about how they worked and lived. The continued work at the Casa della Regina Carolina and by scholars such as Dr. Feito and Dr. Tally-Schumacher thus stand to offer much in the way of re-populating history with the stories of those who fed and nurtured entire empires. 

*Dr. Jessie Feito, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Research Fellow, Institut Català d'Arqueologia Clàssica, GIAP - LAndscape Archaeology Research Group, Post-Doctoral Fellow. 

**Dr. Kaja Tally-Schumacher, Assistant Professor of Environmental History, Harvard Graduate School of Design. 

About the Author

Danielle Vander Horst

Dani is a freelance artist, writer, and a trained archaeologist. Her research specialty focuses on religion in the Roman Northwest, but her educational background encompasses more broadly Greek and Roman art, architecture, materiality, and history. She holds multiple degrees in Classics and Archaeology from the University of Rochester, Cornell University, and Duke University, and she is currently completing a PhD in History of Art & Archaeology at Cornell University.

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