Houses of cards

Extract

We have reached an important moment in the study of the Roman house. The past 20 years have been extremely active, with scholars approaching domestic space down different disciplinary and methodological avenues. Since the important essay on Campanian houses by A. Wallace-Hadrill in 1988, new excavations and scores of books and articles have changed the picture of Pompeii and, with it, that of the Roman house. Theoretical archaeologists have taken the lead, approaching Pompeii as an "archaeological laboratory" in which, armed with the interpretative tools of spatial and statistical analysis, they attempt to recover ancient behavioral patterns. The interdisciplinary picture that emerges is complex and inevitably contradictory. There is so much new information and such a tangle of perspectives that it is time to consider what we have learned and what kinds of interpretative tools we might best employ. Without doubt this is an exciting time in Roman studies. But two overviews of recent scholarship to appear this year, the present one by R. Tybout and another by P. Allison (AJA 105.2 [2001]), express considerable frustration and resort to ad hominem recriminations that signal a heated backlash, at least among some.