Music to Dig By: Pink Floyd plays Pompeii

In October 1971, Pink Floyd recorded six songs in the amphitheater of Pompeii, without an audience. The film 'Live At Pompeii' was released in 1972 (and a director's cut in 2003).

Super epic and purely theatrical at the same time. The lack of an audience symbolizes what happened with progressive rock: the 18-minute jam became the end in itself, without the need to hold a live audience. 'Album-oriented rock' is meant to listen to at home, alone, and stoned, so you don't mind the fact that the song never ends.

Still sounds rad though. Here's 'Echoes', Part Two:

Adopt a Dog from Pompeii

Pompeii is home to a posse of stray dogs who more or less have the run of the ruins. They also strike painfully cute poses like this.


Odone lounges.

The administration at Pompeii and Italian animal welfare organizations have teamed up to try to find these pooches new homes. They all have cute Roman names:

Walking along Pompeii ruins, you could also meet Odone, Paquio, Vesonius, Asclepio or Polibia. These names are inspired to the archaeological area where the dogs live and to the ancient owners of the historical Houses.

..and you can actually apply to adopt one at a booth on site! Check out the website, "I Cani di Pompei" (the dogs of Pompeii) for more.

It's an interesting marketing angle - they're pitching the dogs as a souvenir of Pompeii:"take home a life and a story from Pompeii". Since one can't buy artifacts from Pompeii anymore a stray dog who's intimately familiar with the ruins is the next best thing. It's a clever and kind way of saving tourists a lot of bother.


Meleagro stalks the ruins.

The project is called "(C)ave Canem", a fun play on words ('cave' means both 'beware of' and 'take care of', while 'ave' is a salutation. And it's also playing on the famous mosaic from the House of the Tragic Poet, which you've probably seen before, somewhere:

(Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei)

Thanks to Kevin D.'s facebook feed for the link!

Google Street View comes to Pompeii! Can we rebury it now?

The ruins of ancient Pompeii have hit Google Street View. This is the future of archaeology, folks: virtual walkthroughs of sites available anywhere, anytime, from anywhere in the world. It’s going to change things.

Check it out, it’s amazing.



Italy’s culture minister hopes this will boost tourism, but I hope something different: that Italy will do the politically inconvenient thing and rebury large portions of the old city. Yes, that’s right, I said it. We should record the whole city in 3D with high-resolution, multispectral imagery, then rebury most of Pompeii, with roofs over the rest.

Why? Because the remains of the ancient city are falling apart. And archaeology is destructive by nature. When you dig up a site – especially if you dig up walls made of anything but solid stone – what you find starts to deteriorate, immediately. The conservation situation at Pompeii is bad and getting worse.

It’s not for lack of expertise by the conservators – it’s just that no matter how much money you spend, walls without roofs and plaster on them are going to get damaged by exposure to the weather. The ‘pure’ thing, from the conservation perspective, is to avoid modern interventions at all costs. The only way to avoid roofing a site, and still conserve it, is reburial.

I can hear the howls already. I loved visiting the place myself. But 2.5 million visitors per year is unsustainable, and everybody knows it. If we want future generations to have anything to look at, something has to be done sooner rather than later.

My suggestion: start with street view. Add an ambient soundscape. Open it up to developers to create games and 3D reconstructions based on the archaeology of the city that people can enjoy on the interwebs. And then sell tickets to visit select areas of the site by lottery, with a drastically reduced number of visitors.

Sound harsh? Welcome to reality. If we're really thinking about conservation, we're planning for 1000 or 10,000 years. In most places, the only way to conserve a place for that long is reburial, with the occasional re-excavation as a special event. Technologies like street view are an incredible blessing for archaeology because they let excavators show off a permanent, 3D exhibition of their finds. And if you want to rebury the site, you can, while allowing the public to visit the spaces. If the recording is multi-spectral and high-resolution enough, you could do a lot of scholarship while the ruins sleep safely underground.

Music to Dig By: Souxsie and the Banshees, 'Cities in Dust'

An awesome pop song about the destruction of Pompeii. The video has lots of lava, models of body molds and dancing skeletons. As a bonus prize, we also get Budgie painted white doing interpretive dance about what it's like to have hot ash fill your mouth. Goths heart old stuff. Need I say more?