Volcanic Vineyards of Pompeii

The Ancients

History Hit

History

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

An ancient town, buried and preserved beneath volcanic ash, Pompeii is a gift to archaeologists and historians seeking to find out more about the lives of the civilians in a regular Roman town. Beyond the well recognised plaster casts of the bodies of people and animals alike, and the structures and artwork maintained in situ, however, is evidence of a very specific system. That is the system of the cultivation of grapes and the process of extracting every usable substance from them to make wine. Positioned in the Campania region of Italy, Pompeii shared fertile soils, perfect climatic conditions and proximity to a busy sea port. The grapes of Pompeii may have ended up on the tables of the house at which they were grown; they might have been made into low quality wine for manual workers or better quality wine valued at more than the wages of many; or, they might have been shipped far and wide.

Emlyn Dodd is a Fellow at the Australian Archaeological Institute in Athens and is currently directing a survey project across Cycladic islands which, among other things, is investigating the production of wine and oil in the Classical to Late Antique eras. He spoke to Tristan about what the evidence from Pompeii tells us about grape growth and wine production there, and whether this can be scaled out to other settlements in the Roman Mediterranean.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and today's podcast we are
0:07.5	talking wine. Now Pompeii, it is perhaps the most extraordinary archaeological site of ancient
0:14.3	Roman times. But did you also know that during Pompeii's height this town was also the centre
0:20.8	of a flourishing wine trade. It was here that wine was produced in villas, surrounding and
0:26.3	in Pompeii itself and also where wine was exported from across the Roman Empire.
0:32.4	Now to talk about Pompeii's extraordinary wine trade. I was delighted to be joined by Dr
0:38.0	Emlin Dodd from Macarie University in Sydney. Emlin is a leading expert on Pompeii in wine trade.
0:44.4	He's done a lot of research around it. So it was great to get him on the show to talk about this
0:48.0	topic but also to use this as a springboard to talk about Emlin's more recent research
0:54.0	about wine production elsewhere in the Mediterranean, particularly in the central region on the
0:58.8	Cookler Days Islands. Without further ado, here is Emlin.
1:05.6	Emlin, great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. Now, Pompeii and Herculaneum,
1:10.6	it's surviving archaeology. It's so pivotal for learning so much about the ancient Mediterranean
1:15.1	world and ancient Rome and this is no less true when looking at wine production in ancient Rome.
1:20.4	It's completely right. We're very fortunate with the preservation of Pompeii in general and,
1:25.7	like you said, wine production is no exception. A really nice example is the way the famous
1:31.6	bodies of Pompeii are preserved and then we can look at them through the clustercast, which really
1:36.1	vividly shows us what the people of Pompeii were like and how they met their demise. The same
1:41.2	has been done actually with wine production and the vine roots that people were actually growing
1:46.0	when the eruption happened. Some wonderful archaeological work was done by Jashemsky. She discovered
1:51.4	cavities that roots made when the volcano erupted and poured plaster into them and this is illuminated
1:56.8	exactly how the vines were growing and how the grapes were cultivated when the volcano erupted.
	...

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