Records of Pompeii's survivors have been found
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
> This is an English translation of the two letters written by Pliny the Younger to the Roman historian Tacitus. The first letter describes the journey of his uncle Pliny the Elder during which he perished. The second one describes his own observations in a town across the bay.
https://igppweb.ucsd.edu/~gabi/sio15/lectures/volcanoes/plin...
thanks GeekyBear.
I wonder if there's a clinical research of the long term respiration damage of the survivors.
Although the sentence says "... except by boat". Why she sent a messenger (presumably by boat) to ask Pliny the Elder to pick her up, instead of using that boat itself, is, curious.
Edit: https://igppweb.ucsd.edu/~gabi/sio15/lectures/volcanoes/plin...
It is a mark of the so-called "middle ages" or "dark ages" to have periods in which reporting falls...
So yeah I'm amazed too -- this stuff survives.
(The original poster wrote «records that exist that can be used to tell this story»: of all the documentation that can be lost, that produced during the first imperial Rome is probably some of the most secured. We still lost a lot: for example, the culmination of that period is probably under Trajan, and he wrote the Commentarii de bellis Dacicis - lost, contrary to its model, Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico...)
Without that -- they become lost.
Fun facts, they discovered evidence of syphilis disease from the remains of the dead and restaurants are familiar sights in ancient Pompeii.
[1] What Was Everyday Life Like In Pompeii? | Pompeii with Mary Beard | Absolute History:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Beard_(classicist)
"Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE, FSA, FBA, FRSL (born 1 January 1955)[1] is an English classicist specialising in Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of classics at the University of Cambridge.[2] She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature."
I'm a bit upset that, toward the end, the author puts politics in an article about history and archaeology, and does it poorly to boot.
For their analogy of "How were the survivors treated today," they cite Border Patrol migrant camps and NYC tent cities.
However, that's not really a good comparison. In both of those examples, the displaced people are foreigners fleeing political / economic disasters (or just seeking a better life).
A closer comparison might be Hurricane Katrina, where the displaced people were (mostly) legal residents or citizens, fleeing a natural disaster.
That's a very "end of history" level of understanding of history and archaelogy. History is inherently political because it's shaped by our own politics as much as it is a study of the politics of the past. Even if we don't do it explicitly, we look at history through the lens of our present with all the baggage that means. And it can help reflect on similar situations in the present to learn both how humans handled those situations in the past and how that worked out.
> and does it poorly to boot
That I'm willing to agree on. It does seem apropos of nothing and very hamfisted even if I may agree with the author's general message. I think the problem is actually greater than you say: even the concept of "foreigners" vs "citizens" doesn't translate well as Rome distinguished between foreigners, residents and citizens differently than we do today and "race" didn't exist as a meaningful distinction in the same way. Even the nuances of the differences between different foreign "nations" worked differently so the concept of refugees doesn't really translate all that well to begin with.
No, yours is a kind of fallacy and called Presentism [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(historical_analysi...
> I think the problem is actually greater than you say: even the concept of "foreigners" vs "citizens" doesn't translate well as Rome distinguished between foreigners, residents and citizens differently than we do today and "race" didn't exist as a meaningful distinction in the same way. Even the nuances of the differences between different foreign "nations" worked differently so the concept of refugees doesn't really translate all that well to begin with.
Where you seem to disagree is that history is inherently political, which isn't "a fallacy and called presentism" but is literally calling attention to presentism. Presentism has been widespread in historical analysis throughout much of history. This is obvious in hindsight. What is less obvious is that we still engage in it today even when we think we don't.
The mere notion that presentism is even a thing is a relatively recent development (relative to the field of history as a whole) and that it should be avoided is in itself a political decision (i.e. the decision to try to avoid political bias is in itself informed by politics).
Who were notoriously housed in toxic trailer homes.
It didn't even seem to occur to the author that foreign people in circumstances like these examples would very likely have been enslaved in those times. I am not sure there was even any other possibility for them!?
Not that there were no rights for other people. But it was very different from what we've come to expect.
Slavery was a legal status. There were plenty of poor laborers with no property in Roman cities..
Being forced to leave one’s home is an ordeal no one should be forced to endure, Plutarch began. Geographical dislocation causes undeniable suffering. Everyone admires how the ancient bards channeled that emotion into their soulful poetry and music, he acknowledged. But, he went on, fortunately hardships are never immutable, and one’s circumstances can often improve...
Ambitious foreigners, both men and women, sensed the possibilities. Despite the limitations of not being a citizen, an immigrant to the fourth-century empire could legally go anywhere, work any craft, and be anything."
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/empire-immigrant...
that is literally how they were integrated, especially during the empire era. We have records of a bunch of barbarians showing up and the emperor sending them to farm in various areas of the empire. They were not citizens (unless they went in the army) but they were not slaves.
Especially when some of the people born inside our borders had a hand in creating these non-natural disasters that cause so many to flee their homes.
I watched that documentary. There's no evidence for or against any of those theories.
The guy lists 2 semi-wealthy survivors, then says the above. He also says:
I took Roman names unique to Pompeii or Herculaneum – such as Numerius Popidius and Aulus Umbricius – and searched for people with those names who lived in surrounding communities in the period after the eruption. and found 200 survivors in 12 cities
So he's only searching on unique names, which is an (understandable) bias, and only found 200 out of thousands of people, while saying there are way too few bodies.
There's literally zero evidence to support the fact that the rich bugged out, and only the poor died. In fact, there's evidence to the contrary, with multiple poor people found, and lots of those that didn't do well, their wealth unknown prior to te event.
Frankly how would the rich even do that? Lots of houses, rich and poor, left with belongings. How would the rich prevent escape?
Walking away was likely sufficient.
Leaving a slave behind would be very strange I think.
I didn't see this in the article. Did I miss it?
Methodology is the study of methods (just as sociology is the study of societies).
It is not a method (any more than a sociology is a society).
noun
A system of methods used in a particular area of study or activity.
E.g.: "a methodology for investigating the concept of focal points"
OED
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodology
"In its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods."
I may be wrong, but I think what's happened is that everyone likes saying "methodology", so they do, and so everyone uses it. It's just that it's wrong - but it's normal.
Sociology -> study of societies.
Psychology -> study of the mind and behaviour.
Archaeology -> study of historical human activity (by a particular means).
"ology" -> a branch of learning.
We are not creating new branches of learning, when we are in fact creating a method to investigate a problem.
Also, if we were to say methodology differs to all other uses of -ology, and in fact is a, or a few, methods used to investigate a problem, what word do we then use to describe the study of methods?
a "methodology" can be a logic behind a method. It is a theoretical framework that is supposed to validate the methods you will use.
To create a symmetry, you could pose a problem relevant to (say) Psychology, than develop a "psychology" as a theoretical framework valid in Psychology that justifies your further analysis.
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Specifically to the text, the researcher says he checked occurrences of typical names in inscriptions (etc.) and evidence of re-scaled infrastructure - that is the method. The methodology would be expressed in an accompanying study that justifies that method as valid.
> "In its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods."
Then methodology is overlappable to "Sociology", "Psychology", "Archaeology".
And you will surely find people that will propose that the other sense is more common than the one the Wikipedia editor identified as occasionally preeminent.
> This model for post-disaster recovery can be a lesson for today. The costs of funding the recovery never seems to have been debated. Survivors were not isolated into camps, nor were they forced to live indefinitely in tent cities. There’s no evidence that they encountered discrimination in their new communities.
That's a very different situation than what we see today, and is a completely inappropriate analogy. The survivors of Pompeii moved to adjacent communities about a day's journey from Pompeii. They were not migrants. The best analogy is how we (in the US) have FEMA to handle disasters within American boarders; and how American residents regularly move to different towns / states.
If we had to flag submissions for occasional faults...
For that matter, signs of grave intellectual deficiency are at the beginning already, at
> shooting ... debris up to 20 miles (32.1 kilometers) in the air
Where you are told that volcanic debris has 100 meters precision, starting from a figure that has 16 kilometers fault of precision (use of "precision" here imprecise). These people should not be allowed to leave the house, they fail verification of intellectual competence at the basics (use of "verification" here imprecise). Yet... Yet sometimes their effort does not lead to complete disaster. Be very wary as they are wearing flashing warning lights, but do not throw away the good if it miraculously is there.
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Edit: and it contains a chunk, «In episodes of the TV series “Doctor Who” and “Loki”». By coincidence, the next the eyes met came to be the shout of TheConversation: «Academic rigour, journalistic flair». What do we do, we throw away all of it? Probably not. It is a very imperfect world.