In the Shadow of Vesuvius - RAC/TRAC March 2014

At the next RAC/TRAC conference there will be an all day session on (Saturday 29th March) on recent research on what was happening in the region in the centuries before the eruption.  The speakers will be Robyn Veal, Ferdinando de Simone, Michael Anderson, Steven Ellis, Antonella Coralini, Nicolas Monteix, Gary Foster, Richard Hobbs, David Griffiths, Ria Berg, Katie Huntley and Anna Anguissola.

The session abstract is as follows. 

This one day session will bring together people working on a range of international projects in the cities of Pompeii and Ercolano and the surrounding countryside. The focus will be on the new information emerging from excavation of the pre-eruption layers, and explore what lead up to the cities and sites that everyone thinks they know. It will start with two papers exploring the hinterland resources.  These will serve too as an introduction to the area under discussion.  It will then move on to four papers exploring the changing townscapes of the two cities, and will show how the well-known landscape of houses, bars and bakeries was a relatively recent phenomenon.  A century before visitors would have encountered industrial installations bordering even main roads into the centre.  The afternoon will be start with three papers exploring changing consumption patterns and contacts.  These will set the sites within the wider Mediterranean world, and show the development of the consumer society that is so familiar to us from exhibitions such as that in the British Museum during the summer of 2013.  The day will conclude with three papers exploring aspects of life in AD 79 as demonstrated by the eruption level.  These will both sum up the day and look forward to the workshop.

I have posted the full abstracts of all the papers at http://independent.academia.edu/HilaryCool/Talks
and no doubt they will soon be on the conference web site itself. That is http://www.reading.ac.uk/archaeology/Conferences/RAC2014/