"Life and death, Pompeii and Herculaneum" Visit guid for secondary teachers

British Museum

Sujets

• Arts

Informations

• Publié par: Fil_Culture
• Publié le: 11 septembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 73
• Langue: English

Extrait

Visit guide for
secondary teachers

Life and death
Pompeii and
Herculaneum
28 March – 29 September 2013

Portrait of baker Terentius Neo
and his wife. Pompeii, AD 55–79.
© Soprintendenza Speciale
per i Beni Archeologici di
Napoli e Pompei.













Contents

About the exhibition 3
Using the exhibition 4
Preparing your visit 5
Background information 10
Exhibition image bank 17
Further resources 18
Enquiry sheet: rooms of the house 20
Enquiry sheet: public and private 21
Enquiry sheet: slaves 22
Enquiry sheet: mosaics and paintings 23
Enquiry sheet: work and skills 24


Visit guide for secondary teachers
Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum 2
About the exhibition

This exhibition focuses on the house and home life in Pompeii and Herculaneum in
the first century AD rather than on the towns themselves and the cultural
institutions and practices associated with town life, such as trade, the forum, public
entertainment, the baths, politics and so on.

Objects in the exhibition are grouped according to the room of the house with
which they are most closely associated. The exhibition is intended to evoke
something of the layout of a house in Pompeii or Herculaneum and does not
reconstruct an actual house.


The layout of the exhibition is as follows:

Introduction and video presentation introduces the two towns, the nature of the
eruption that destroyed them and how what was preserved offers insight into the
lives of their inhabitants.
Outside the house a glimpse of the urban context of the houses and street life;
two displays on a shop and a tavern
The rooms of the house the main part of the exhibition is a room-by-room display
of objects, paintings and mosaics
Dying the final section examines the destruction of the towns and the fate of those
who died, but stresses their lives as represented through their possessions,
homes, images and words.

Sexual content
Please be aware that some objects and images in the exhibition have sexual
overtones, mostly due to the depiction of a phallus. In the Garden section of the
exhibition, there is a statue of the goat god Pan having sexual intercourse with a
goat. This statue has been placed in an area which you will find easy to avoid if
you prefer. Explicit sexual imagery was an accepted feature of ancient Roman
culture and, in the case of the phallus, was associated with good luck and fertility.
These associations may be of help in dealing with students’ questions.

Dead bodies
One of the first objects the students will see is the famous plaster cast of a
struggling dog. The final section of exhibition includes one resin and five plaster
casts of human victims of the eruption of Vesuvius, including a family of two adults
and three children. Please encourage students to behave with respect in this
section. Response to the casts can range from exaggerated revulsion to prurient
interest to emotional upset. We recommend talking with students about the casts in
school, before they visit the exhibition. Discuss how the casts were made (see
page 15), how the objects discovered with them inform us about who the people
were and what they decided to carry with them in their attempt to escape the
eruption, and how they remind us that this distant historical disaster was a real
event involving real people.

For both areas, you may find hepful an article by Steven Hunt to be published
Easter 2013 in Journal of Classics Teaching 27 (JACT)


Visit guide for secondary teachers
Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum 3
Using the exhibition

In advance
Decide on a focus for the visit and a follow-up activity and go through these with
the students. Some examples of possible ‘big question’ focuses are given on
page 5.

If you are using activity sheets, go through them with the students in advance.
Use the ideas in Pre-visit preparation below (see page 6) and the exhibition image
bank (see page 17) to provide general background and to familiarise students with
some of the content of the exhibition.

On the day
Divide the class into small groups, preferably with an adult assigned to each group.
Give each adult a free exhibition guide, available at the exhibition entrance.
Give each adult a copy of any activity sheets the students are using. Explain what
you want the students to do in the exhibition.
Encourage adults to allow students to linger at which interest them, to discuss what
they see and share things they find out as they go round.
Remind students to behave calmly and politely.
Photography is not allowed within the exhibition, but students may take photos of
relevant objects in the Museum’s permanent galleries.

Afterwards
Discuss the students’ thoughts and responses to the exhibition.
Use what the students have gathered in the exhibition for the follow-up activity.
Re-visit the exhibition image bank, if relevant.


Visit guide for secondary teachers
Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum 4
Preparing your visit

We recommend the following three guidelines in planning your students’
visit to the exhibition:
 provide an enquiry focus that students should keep in mind as they explore the
exhibition and which you can follow up afterwards
 do some preparatory work in school to develop the focus and familiarise students
with the content of the exhibition
 avoid over-directing the students’ work - allow them some scope to explore to find
objects that interest them

General enquiries
You may decide that there is no particular aspect of Pompeii and Herculaneum
that you want to consider. In this case, one of these general enquiry questions may
serve to focus the visit:
 What was the most interesting object in the exhibition?
 What did I learn about the Romans that I did not know before?
 What sources of evidence does the exhibition include and how useful did I find
them for learning about Roman life?
 What have I learned about the Roman world from the objects in the exhibition?
 What else would I put in the exhibition to make it interesting/informative?

Specific enquiries
You may prefer to target specific aspects of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Do bear in
mind the focus of the exhibition is the house – the amphitheatre and baths would
not be suitable areas to try to cover. Below are some suggestions for topics
students could explore profitably. You may also find it useful to look at the visit
guide for primary teachers, in which the activity sheets focus on specific rooms and
specific characters who might frequent the house.

 What can I learn from the exhibition about the life of men (or women, or slaves),
or about religion or literacy or the crafts and trades that existed in Pompeii and
Herculaneum or how Romans showed power and status?
 Give the students lists of the functions of each room in the house. Ask them to
identify objects displayed in each room that relate to that function.
 Public and private space is an important concept in the study of houses. Discuss
this with the students and identify four characters who might be present in a
Pompeian house, for example, the master, slaves, house guests, clients,
business associates. Ask the students to think as they go round the exhibition
about which rooms these characters would be able to access and to select an
object from each room that is connected with that access, for example, a bronze
caccabus/cooking pot used by slaves in the kitchen.
 Introduce students to the different sorts of slaves that might be present in the
house, from unskilled cleaners to secretaries and teachers. Ask the students to
choose objects in the exhibition that would be used by or relate in some other
way to the jobs done by each of the types of slave.
 Most archaeologists believe that the frescoes and mosaics in houses are not
simply expressions of personal taste, but often relate to the purpose of the room,
provide humorous or serious comments on life or communicate something of the
status, interests the owner of the house wishes to convey. Ask the students to
select four paintings or mosaics form different rooms and to reflect on why they
Visit guide for secondary teachers
Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum 5
were in that room and what they could be intended to communicate to the person
visiting the room.
 Use an object from the exhibition slideshow to consider the level of skill need to
make it, the raw materials and the process involved in producing the final piece.
Consider too what would be involved in looking after the object: cleaning and
polishing for example. Ask the students to select one object from each room in
the exhibition that would present the house slaves with challenges of cleaning or
upkeep and one object from