Once Pompeii was buried under ash and then the looters lost interest, it sat, forgotten about, for centuries. Or at least, that’s how I understand things. So say it’s some random day between c. 150CE and 1592CE, when an architect found it but didn’t follow through with any excavations.
What would a person who walked over the ruins of Pompeii below them have seen? Would the whole thing have looked no different from any other patch of land in the region (fields and groves of trees and such)?
A small informal settlement was built atop the buried city and lasted until the 6th Century, by which time Pompeii’s exact location was all but forgotten. For the next thousand years, the location would just look like the abandoned remains of a small, nameless village.
ETA: apparently, that small settlement and its remains were also covered by subsequent eruptions.
Jakob Philipp Hackert’s well-known painting of 1799 gives a good sense of what the site looked like when only a small section, basically just part of Regio VIII, had been excavated. Some parts of the view in the painting were outside the town, being the sea before AD 79. But the areas in the foreground and to the right have since been excavated.
The Excavations at Pompeii 608992 | National Trust Collections
Every so often someone would dig down and do a little looting.
As I understood, that was people who had fled the city during the eruption, and knew where to look (or robbers who knew who had money and where there houses were). It apparently started once the ground was cooled off enough. I read that there were a few tunnels that went wandering through some houses. Also read something about marble columns being retreived. A lot of the “carved columns” in the ruins today are actually brick columns with plaster sculpted to look like marble columns.
I recently watched this documentary about the current excavation and they mentioned the tunnels:
They excavated an intact wooden wagon and mentioned that there was a looter’s tunnel just a few inches away. The looters probably wouldn’t have wanted the wagon, but their tunnel could have destroyed it if it went through the wagon.
That documentary is currently streaming on PBS until Nov 5th. If you have any interest in Pompeii, it’s well worth your time. They are doing excavations in the ritzy part of the city and it’s astounding to see these wealthy homes in relatively good condition.