ACADEMIC WORK

This monograph offers the first interdisciplinary study of Pompeii’s urban agricultural gardens, uncovering their overlooked social, nutritional, and economic significance. Contrary to the image of Pompeii as densely urban, at least a third of the city was cultivated, with ten percent devoted to productive landscapes. Drawing on archaeological, archaeobotanical, spatial, and epigraphic evidence, it reveals the sustainable practices thriving in Pompeii’s vineyards, orchards, and vegetable plots as vital to the city’s identity. A fresh application of spatial theory shows how, after the AD 62 earthquake, urban agriculture surged within Pompeii’s walls. This revelation challenges conventional understandings of Pompeii's urban landscape and marks a seminal moment in the study of ancient urban agriculture, reshaping our view of horticulture's enduring legacy in the minds, spaces, and memories of ancient Romans.

Wilhelmina Jashemski estimated that 9.7% of Pompeii's urban area was dedicated to agricultural gardens, compared to 5.4% for ornamental gardens (1990). Yet, their presence and impact remain understudied. Using a novel methodology, this study contributes to a growing body of scholarship on ancient urban agriculture by mapping agricultural gardens created or expanded in Pompeii after the AD 62 earthquake. The rapid expansion of these gardens is linked to a response to crisis, as well as an increasing demand for cash crops in the first century AD, particularly in Regions I and II, where this demand surpassed residential land needs. Reflecting broader trends in commercialisation, the shifting urban-rural divide, and the integration of Roman identity into urban landscapes, Pompeii’s final years are novelly reconstructed through its green spaces, revealing how horticultural opportunism played a crucial role in the town's resilience and urban development, and deepening our understanding of Pompeii's economy.

From the late Republic to early Imperial period, the Roman garden occupied a liminal space between the notions of rus and urbs, characterised as the ‘cultural faultline’ by Spencer in her study of Roman landscape in 2006 (p.246). During this period, the Roman garden came to typify permeable boundaries between the countryside and the urban centre, the former characterised by traditional values of rusticity and subsistence-living, and the latter typified by ambitions for political power and social security. In using the contemporary concepts of hard and soft landscape elements as a frame, this paper will investigate the manifestation of elite notions of rus and urbs in the empirical space of the hortus. Boundaries of division, obstruction, privatisation, and social direction, as defined by hard and soft landscape elements, will be assessed. In so doing, an assessment of the fluency of “ordinary” individuals in the epistemological discourses of the dominant class will be made, allowing an exploration of the tension between who we imagine “enjoying” and “making” place in the garden, and where, when, and why.