A close look at Pompeii’s stone-paved streets has shown how traffic through the ancient city changed dramatically after it was incorporated into the Roman world.
Although often seen as a quintessentially Roman place, Pompeii was anything but. For several centuries it was actually governed by a different people known as the Samnites – and even after it fell to the Romans in 89 BC, Pompeii retained traces of its Samnite identity right up until its destruction by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.
“If I was visiting Pompeii in AD 78, it would have had a very different character than a city closer to Rome,” says at Florida State University.
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Despite this, however, life in Pompeii did change after it became a Roman colony, says Picker-Kille. He has concluded that traffic patterns shifted – potentially evidence of local entrepreneurs reorganising their business operations to cater to Rome’s vast trade networks.
His conclusion came in part from the fact that the Samnites and Romans had slightly different measurement systems. Crucially, these differences are significant enough that we can tell whether pairs of wheel ruts worn into Pompeii’s streets were left by Samnite-style or Roman-style carts.
Using this fact, Picker-Kille discovered that ruts in the streets around Pompeii’s northern city gate – which faces Vesuvius – were typically left by Samnite-style carts. Ruts in the streets around Pompeii’s southern gate – which faces the Sarno river – were typically left by Roman-style carts.
This doesn’t tell us when those different carts were in use – but there are clues from a led by at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. With colleagues, Poehler built up a detailed picture of how in response to the wheel rut damage caused by carts.
After studying this evidence, Picker-Kille realised it showed that the streets around the northern city gate were most heavily used and repaired in the decades just after Pompeii became a Roman colony. The streets around the southern gate, in contrast, were most heavily used later in Pompeii’s history, shortly before the eruption of Vesuvius.
Collectively, this suggests Pompeii’s traffic changed from being mostly Samnite-style carts entering the north gate to being mostly Roman-style carts entering the south gate. “We’re seeing this shift affecting different kinds of vehicles used in different areas of the city,” says Picker-Kille.
He suspects this reflects Rome’s influence. Under Samnite rule, Pompeiians had traditionally farmed on the fertile lands around Vesuvius to the north of Pompeii. After the Romans took over, Pompeiians might have preferred farming on lands to the south so as to be nearer to the Sarno river, on which archaeologists suspect there was a port that tapped into Rome’s maritime trade network.
“I think it’s an innovative and important study,” says at the University of New Hampshire. He is impressed with the way Picker-Kille used evidence from within Pompeii to understand the relationship between the city and its surrounding countryside. “Much of the Pompeiian countryside is still buried and out of reach,” he says.
Journal of Archaeological Science
