Paving Pompeii: The Archaeology of Stone-Paved Streets

Careful survey of Pompeii’s lava-stone pavements reveals a complex history of their origin, their repair, and the municipal administration that oversaw them. Our paper first examines two processes that inform our survey’s methodology: the laying of a stone pavement and the subsequent patterns of wear that degraded it. We describe the five forms of evidence from Pompeii’s streets that resulted from these processes and allow for the identification of individual sections of paving. Using both relative and absolute chronological evidence, we order these sections of paving into eight phases of development. Finally, a detailed analysis of the frequency and extent of these individual paving events sheds light on a pavement’s expected life-span as well as implications for the administrative and financial upkeep required to maintain a street network.