House of Julius Polybius and Der Spiegel

I was reminded by Francesca's re-posting of Der Spiegel's article about 'recent' research to reconstruct the final hours of the inhabitants of the House of Julius Polybius that I was deeply suspicious that this was new research ... So, a little investigation later, I can tell you that Luongo, Perrotta and Scarpati gave a conference paper on the effects of the eruption on the House of Julius Polybius in 1997 (I even went to it, I have the conference material to prove it!), and they published an article on it in 2001:

Luongo, G., Perrotta A. e Scarpati C. 2001. 'L'impatto dei prodotti di eruzioni esplosive sull' ambiente: l'eruzione del 79 d.C. a Pompei'. In: La casa di Giulio Polibio. Studi Interdisciplinari. Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. Edizione: Centro Studi Arte Figurative, Università di Tokyo, pp. 215-238.

Of course, this doesn't mean that they're not still working on it ... I wonder where Der Spiegel got its information from?

Luongo, Perrotta and Scarpati were involved in the production of a Japanese CDRom: 'La casa di Julius Polybius' by Masanori Aoyagi, 2001. They have published a whole bunch of articles on the impact on the eruption on structures, and I will list those in a comment to this post.

In 2003, the BBC made a documentary entitled 'Pompeii. The Last Day', which tells the story of the final hours of the inhabitants of the House of Julius Polybius, and also of other characters (such as Stephanus, of the Fullery of Stephanus). The work of Luongo, Perrotta and Scarpati is not explicitly credited, but I can't believe that it didn't influence the documentary ...

(Four other parts of this documentary can also be seen on UTube.)