Pompeii specialist, William van Andringa Search in the remains of the daily practices indications that have not been recorded by the texts or monuments.
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William van Andringa, a specialist in religious and funerary practices of the Roman world, is director of study at the Practice Ecole of the Higher Education and a member of the University Institute of France. He is a colareat, with the Anthropologist Henri Duday (CNRS), of the Simone and Cino del Duca Foundation’s Grand Prix 2021 for his work on the Necropolis of Porta Nocera, in Pompeii, and author of archeology of the gesture. Rites and practices in Pompeii (editions Hermann, 2021).
You have just published a manifest form for the “gesture archeology”. What is it?
Archeology is not intended to discover the exceptional. Twenty years spent studying the most trivial vestiges even ended up convincing me otherwise. The main interest of this discipline lies in its ability to report on the daily activity of the populations of the past. The tasks we realize, the objects we manipulate and, in general, the gestures we perform leave traces. And some sites are able to record them.
This is the case of Porta Nocera necropolis, in Pompeii, whose cladding soils have been preserved under a layer of four meters of ash and stone pumice, exactly in the state where they were At the time of the eruption of the Vesuvius, in the year 79. The excavations pushed that my team has undertaken at this place has allowed him to reconstruct whole sequences of gestures associated with rituals. Other discoveries followed, who gradually brought us to reflect on the place of archeology. This is not so much in the field of historical research and the field of human sciences. In the vast majority of cases, an archaeological vestige does not show us the man as he wants to be, but as he is. He is a piece of conviction that testifies to the way he has appropriated a territory and the way he has built a tradition. This is the message we wanted to pass through this manifesto.
The US and the customs of the Romans not known to us?
Antiquity has the immense benefit from the prehistory of having left us texts and monuments. The study of this material has considerably enriched our perception of the Roman world. We know his ideas. We know how his architecture, his art, his industry, his business has evolved. There has been a lot of information on its political, economic or religious organization. But, at the end of the day, these sources give us access only to the great trends: to the “standards” of ancient life, if you want. They do not tell us how these standards were implemented, depending on the individual experience or family or local customs. And, therefore, they do not know most of the cultural and social characters attached to this civilization.
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