Pompeii and Herculaneum are unique. As the cliche goes - cities frozen in time, lives interrupted. They provide a wealth
of information on the lives of the women, children and men who lived within their walls. They provide evidence - an abundance of it, that illuminates an ancient culture at all levels, regardless of gender, sexuality, age, race or social status. Archaeologists are able to construct a history that is rarely told. The work of Andrew Wallace-Hadrill provides us with details of how houses were used, the socio economic mix of insulae and generally lives within the walls of houses. My passion in history is unlocking the real lives of women in the past and questioning ideas of sexuality and gender - through the tools offered by new ways of reading and deconstructing history, but also through objects and physical evidence presented by archaeologists. The houses studied by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill provides a forum to explore these lives and ask these questions. His work exposes the misconceptions of the lives within houses, which he says generally are derived from modern comparisions. He is able to show the close interconnections of spheres: public and private, family and outsider and work and leisure, that in a modern context we assume are discrete. Through his work it is possible to view the dynamic social environment of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but also within the houses themsleves. It provides us with a social history - a new understanding of real urban life in these cities.
But this is not where Wallace-Hadrill's contribution ends. Those of us who persue history for pleasure often fill our heads with big words, complex sentences and dense paragraphs. We DO love our words. In fact, my idea of the perfect friday night involves a cup of tea and writing sentences like Foucalt articulates many of the disquiets or dissatisfactions generated by the normative model of constructions of sexuality and demonstrates that sexual difference is a fragile bond for political identification, which deviates from cannonised models of representations of sexuality, particulary in the exhaustive binarised categories of the structuralists, and that these binarised categories need to be complicated and proliferated through a careful attention to other axis of sexual differentation in antiquity in order to challenge the authority of the conventional models of phalocentric and hetrocentric representations of sexuality within the historical account. (That was fun! Really! And by the way, I'm re-reading Foucault's History of Sexuality Volume 1 at the moment if anyone picked it - Lol! I DO love my words!!) But there is a real danger to the exclusivity of the academics of history - the past belongs to us all, and therefore discourses around history should not exclude. As ethical questions of ownership of Pompeii and Herculaneum are explored daily, and as tourism funds preservation, conservation and reconstrcution, archaeologists are findin themselves accountable to the public - and that the public demand accessability.
Andrew-Wallace Hadrill is exeptional in this domain. He presents as thoughtful, thorough and above all generally engaging and enthusiastic. He is able to draw the public into his ideas and concepts through his public persona and open approach. He delivers both at an academic and general interest level and, importantly, understands the value in both. And while I will always love my big words, I love that there are professionals that realise the love of history is just as important. That accessibility means that more people can learn about the past in a way that can inform their own lives.
I love that I can put a documentary hosted by Andrew on and that you guys will simulatenously be engaged and informed. This approach is such an importantfacet of the concept of modern historiography.
I also think he is pretty cute too.... but shhh!
(NB: First person to translate my 'sentence' about Foucualt and readings on the construction of sexuality - I'll do your
homework for a week!)