2. Excavation of the Villa della Pisanella, Boscoreale, after 1895. Note the dolia, or storage jars, some of them buried, in the foreground.
3. Excavation of the Villa of Numerius Popidius Florus, Boscoreale, 1906
6
and paintings. The excavators never went beyond the building complexes to look for the roads that obviously must have connected these houses to each other and to the city or for tombs or other elements that would have revealed the general topography of the area. The scanty accounts of these campaigns do not include even simple notations, for example about the depth of the trenches, data that might have given us some idea of the morphology of the area, or any description of the objects or buildings they uncovered, information that might have suggested earlier activity on these sites. It was also typical to fill the
trenches in when the excavation was finished and return the land, which was privately owned, to agricultural use. If the Villa di Diomede and the Villa dei Misteri (Villa of the Mysteries), which are closer to Pompeii and thus might in fact be considered part of the city, are excluded, the first villa in this area to be excavated using modern, scientific archaeological methods and left visible afterward was the Villa Regina at Boscoreale, in the 1970s. 3 As a result there is no trace of these excavations; all that remains to examine are a few partial site plans and some photographs that have no real value for understanding the configuration of this region. To add insult to injury, the maps indicating the general locations of the private excavations, compiled by Matteo della Corte, the inspector of the Soprintendenza di Napoli charged with monitoring them, were lost, and over the decades even the sites were forgotten. Recent efforts to relocate the sites have so far identified 102 villas, 21 necropoleis and individual tombs, and 3 rural sanctuaries. 4 Even though much information has been lost, the discovery of so many country houses spurred important studies, especially by English-speaking scholars, on the economy of Pompeii and Roman agriculture. 5 A topographical reconstruction of the region must therefore be based primarily on the still scarce data from the more recent excavations undertaken largely in preparation for new public and private building projects. The most fundamental information this research has revealed is that the area around Mount Vesuvius was populated long before Pompeii was founded. Excavations in 1998 – 99 for a tunnel on the Circumvesuviana railway line at Boscoreale, not far from the Villa della Pisanella, revealed nine earlier strata beneath the layer of ash deposited by the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79. 6 Evidence of cultivation over a forest, perhaps of pine trees, was preserved in a sequence of early layers that date between what is called the Mercato eruption of Vesuvius, some 8,000 years ago, and the Avellino eruption, which occurred about 3,700 years ago during the Early Bronze Age. (Both are labeled “Plinian eruptions” after Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the similar eruption in 79 that killed his uncle, Pliny the Elder. In his Letters [6.16.5 – 6], the young Pliny likened the twenty-mile-high column of explosive gas that rose to the stratosphere to “a pine tree; for it shot up