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Hello. Last time, you located Pompeii on its plateau above the Sarno valley and used the Forum, theatre quarter, and amphitheatre to orient yourself inside the walls. Today, you will add time to that map. The aim is to place the city’s development, destruction, rediscovery, and excavation in order—and to avoid treating everything visible at Pompeii as if it belonged to a single moment. Allow about 35–40 minutes, including the reading and map study.
The city before the eruption
Pompeii’s origins are less certain than the date of its destruction. The earliest surviving evidence for substantial walls dates to the late seventh or early sixth century BCE. That tells us a settlement was being enclosed by then; it does not give us an exact founding year. Over subsequent centuries, the city developed amid Greek and Etruscan influences, expanded during its Samnite period, and became closely tied to Rome.
Read the short historical section of the Archaeological Park’s guide before using the timeline below. It moves quickly across many centuries, so concentrate first on the order of phases, rather than trying to retain every date.
A Guide to the Pompeii Excavations
Read “A brief history of the ancient city and the excavations” from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii for a compact account of both the ancient city and the later history of digging it up.
On printed pp. 8–9, in “A brief history of the ancient city and the excavations,” begin where the text says “The origins of the city remain uncertain.” Read the historical account through the final paragraph about how excavators divided and named parts of the city. Track the sequence from early walls to Samnite urban development, Roman colony, earthquake, eruption, rediscovery, and excavation. The opening description of the plateau revisits the setting from the previous lesson.
Here are the principal ancient phases in a form you can return to:
| Approximate date | Phase | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Late 7th–early 6th century BCE | Earliest substantial evidence for the settlement | Walls enclose an area on the plateau. |
| Late 5th–4th centuries BCE | Samnite period | Pompeii becomes more extensively urbanized; its defenses are rebuilt. |
| By the early 3rd century BCE | Alliance with Rome | Pompeii participates in Rome’s political network without yet being a Roman colony. |
| 90–89 BCE | Revolt and siege | Pompeii joins other Italian communities in conflict with Rome and is besieged. |
| 80 BCE | Roman colony | A colony is established at Pompeii; its public and private buildings continue to change under Roman rule. |
| 62 CE | Major earthquake | Damage prompts repairs and rebuilding that are still relevant to the city buried in 79. |
| 79 CE | Eruption of Vesuvius | Volcanic deposits bury the city. |
A useful chronological caution: BCE dates count downward toward the present. The fourth century BCE follows the fifth; the siege in 89 BCE precedes the colony established in 80 BCE.
The transition to Roman rule was not the moment at which a new city replaced an old one. Older streets, walls, and buildings persisted while people modified or rebuilt them. The Forum you located last time therefore has a history, not a single construction date. Later lessons will examine how archaeologists recognize such changes in the fabric of individual buildings.
Two events before and during burial
The earthquake of 62 CE and the eruption of 79 CE belong close together on a timeline, but they did different things to the archaeological record. The earthquake damaged an inhabited city. In the years that followed, its residents repaired some structures, altered others, and left work unfinished. Seventeen years later, the eruption buried a city that was still changing.
That distinction prevents a common mistake. If a building contains signs of repair beneath eruption deposits, the repair need not be an emergency response to the eruption. It may belong to the longer interval after the earthquake. Equally, Pompeii in 79 CE was not simply a pristine example of a Roman city at its peak: damage and rebuilding were part of its appearance.
For this timeline, 79 CE is the secure date to retain. The guide gives the traditional date of 24 August, but the exact day of the eruption is debated. You do not need to settle that debate to order the major phases. You do need to distinguish the ancient earthquake and eruption from the much later acts of finding and exposing their remains.
Burial also did not make the site a perfectly sealed container forever. Material could be recovered after the disaster, and later encounters with the buried ruins occurred before organized excavation. “Preserved by the eruption” is a useful shorthand, provided it does not imply that nothing happened at the site afterward.
Rediscovery is not the same as excavation
The guide places encounters with the buried city in the late sixteenth century, but gives 1748 as the beginning of excavations at Pompeii. Both dates matter because they describe different activities. Coming across ancient remains is not the same as mounting a sustained effort to uncover the city.
The eighteenth-century work was followed by continuing excavations through the nineteenth century. Methods and priorities changed along the way: early digging often sought striking objects and decorated surfaces, while later investigators increasingly tried to expose and record buildings as parts of an urban site. This was not a clean overnight conversion from “treasure hunting” to archaeology. The distinction to keep in mind is that how people excavated affected what later scholars could know.
Watch this brief portion of A Timeline of Pompeii from Weird History for a visual transition between early digging and Giuseppe Fiorelli’s nineteenth-century work. Treat its contrast between the two periods as an overview, not a claim that every early excavation used identical methods.
Watch “A Timeline of Pompeii” by Weird History for a short account of the changing aims and methods of excavation.
Watch early digging for the account of eighteenth-century searches and their costs to the site. Continue with Fiorelli’s methods, focusing on the contrast between extracting objects and excavating more systematically. The details of plaster casting will receive closer attention later in the course.
One nineteenth-century marker is especially useful. In 1858, Fiorelli divided Pompeii into regiones (districts) and insulae (blocks) for study and administration. The numbering helps identify where a discovery came from. It belongs to the history of studying Pompeii, not to the ancient city’s own sequence of political phases.
Reading an excavation map as a timeline
The map below colors areas according to periods in which they were excavated, beginning in 1748 and extending to recent work. Its legend is in German: Erster Spatenstich marks the first digging, while 1983 bis heute means “1983 to today.” Compare it with the mental map from the previous lesson: earlier excavation colors appear prominently in the western part of the city; other areas were exposed during later campaigns.
Spend about five minutes tracing the legend against the plan. Start with the eighteenth-century colors, move to the nineteenth-century bands, then find the twentieth-century and most recent markings. Notice that the work did not proceed as one uniform sweep across the city: patches of different excavation periods sit beside one another.
The map is a second timeline laid over the first. A house in an area excavated in the twentieth century was not necessarily built later than a house exposed in the eighteenth. The color tells you when modern investigators uncovered that part of Pompeii, not when its ancient inhabitants constructed it. Likewise, an uncolored or unexcavated area is not evidence that ancient Pompeii had nothing there.
Excavation has continued into recent decades, alongside restoration, documentation, and conservation. These activities form the latest phase of Pompeii’s archaeological history. Exposure makes a building available for study, but also subjects it to weather and other pressures; caring for what has already been uncovered is therefore part of the site’s ongoing story.
Two chronologies to carry forward
Pompeii has an ancient timeline—early settlement, Samnite urban development, alliance and then colonization under Rome, earthquake, and eruption. It also has an archaeological timeline—later encounters with the buried site, excavations beginning in 1748, nineteenth-century changes in recording, and work continuing into the present. The eruption connects them, but it does not erase the centuries on either side.
Keep the dates 80 BCE, 62 CE, 79 CE, and 1748 CE as particularly useful anchors: Roman colony, earthquake, eruption, and start of excavations. Around those anchors, remember that both the ancient city and its modern recovery unfolded in stages.
Next, you will look more closely at what survived those stages: buildings, objects, biological remains, writing, images, and human remains. That will give you a vocabulary for describing Pompeii’s evidence before drawing conclusions from it.