Herculaneum library excavation funding comes through

I've been remiss in not mentioning the ongoing story about the campaign to reopen excavations at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. So here's some good news (and let's all keep our fingers crossed for even better yet to come):

A PHILANTHROPIST has stepped forward to fund excavations at the ancient city of Herculaneum in Italy, where scholars believe a Roman library lies buried beneath 90ft of lava from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.

David W Packard, whose family helped to found the Hewlett-Packard computer company, is concerned that the site may be poorly conserved or that excavation of the library may not continue unless he underwrites the work. . .

There has been concern in academic circles that the already excavated parts of the Roman city are falling into disrepair and that there are no plans for excavating the Villa of the Papyri. . .

The villa is regarded as one of the most important unexcavated sites in Italy. Previous exploratory digs unearthed 1,800 charred manuscripts, many of them unknown or known only through references in other works.

That was in the 18th century, however.

It is believed that there are thousands more scrolls in the building, much of which lies beneath the modern town of Ercolano, and that they may include lost works by Aristotle, Livy and Sappho.

That really should have read, "it is fervently hoped".

Packard, a former classics scholar who lives in California, runs the Packard Humanities Institute, which supports archeological work in Bosnia, Albania and other countries. . .

He said there should be no conflict between those who want to excavate the villa immediately and those who argue in favour of conserving the whole site, generally acknowledged to be in a poor state of repair.

From the Sunday Times. Another article from a couple of weeks back in the Globe and Mail, which discusses the scrolls in a bit more detail:

Unfortunately, the volcano's preservative qualities also made the blackened scrolls extremely hard to unravel and read. More than 1,700 of them were discovered during the first excavation of Herculaneum in the mid-18th century, but it is only recently, with the application of NASA-developed multispectral imaging technology, that researchers have been able to decipher many of the ancient works.

"The pace of our investigations has accelerated tremendously," says Roger Macfarlane of Brigham Young University. "It's fair to say we've made more progress in understanding these papyri in the last five years than in the previous 50."

And offers a bit of balance regarding the prospects:

So far, the papyri have not produced their hoped-for rewards: Considerable material from a lesser-known 1st-century BC Greek philosopher named Philodemus, who taught Virgil and seems to have worked out of the Villa, but little from the classical world's big names. . .

"Certainly we need to address the critical conservation problems at Herculaneum before we undertake new digging," Prof. Fowler says. "Except at the Villa of the Papyri. This is the jewel of the archeological world, and to leave it unexcavated is indefensible in the long run."

Prof. Wallace-Hadrill is both more cautious and more skeptical. "It worries me if we fantasize for too long about this amazing Holy Grail of lost literature. Archeology is a much more banal business, and we have to excavate according to the entire context of the site in a calm and considerate way. If you pin all your hopes on a lost library, you're heading for disappointment. And if you end up excavating in the wrong way, you're heading for ruin."

Posted by David on February 13, 2005 9:48 PM