Quick questions on Ethics, display and ownership of Pompeii and Herculaneum: HSC Ancient History

Legal ownership of Pompeii and Herculaneum, including undiscovered antiquities, rests with the Italian state under the 2004 Codice dei Beni Culturali e del Paesaggio (Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code), and the site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (with Torre Annunziata) in 1997. Yet the practical work of excavation and conservation has always depended on international expertise and funding: Karl Weber's careful 1750s recording, the Swedish Pompeii Project's digital survey since 2000, and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's Herculaneum Conservation Project (since 2001), jointly funded by the Packard Humanities Institute, the British School at Rome, and the Italian Soprintendenza.

Lazer (Resurrecting Pompeii, 2009), the leading modern anthropological authority on the Pompeian skeletal material, argues that this kind of presentation risks treating the casts as sensational "objects", curiosities to be photographed for their visceral shock value, rather than as the remains of once-living, identifiable individuals who deserve the same rigour and respect owed to any human remains. Lazer's own methodology (measuring bone density, dental wear and demographic data from CT scans of casts since around 2015) models an alternative: scientifically disciplined study that treats the dead as evidence-bearing individuals, not props.

The AD 79 victims could not consent to being cast in plaster, scanned, isotope-tested or exhibited. This is a structural ethical problem shared with other archaeological human-remains debates (Egyptian mummies, Indigenous Australian ancestral remains), even though, unlike those cases, no living descendant community can be consulted on behalf of the Pompeian and Herculanean dead.

The Antiquarium at Pompeii reopened in 2021 with a more reflective, contextualised display of the "Pompeii Couple" cast, responding directly to critiques like Lazer's by foregrounding the individuals' final moments and human context rather than presenting the cast as an unexplained curiosity. Sarah Levin-Richardson (2019) has pushed the argument further for particular contexts, urging caution about publicly displaying remains recovered from sexually charged settings such as the Lupanare, where display can compound the loss of dignity in death.

On 6 November 2010, the Schola Armaturarum, a gladiators' training building on the Via dell'Abbondanza, collapsed after heavy rain. A 1930s Maiuri-era reinforced-concrete repair had trapped moisture inside the structure, and decades of underfunded maintenance, set against rising visitor numbers, caught up with the building all at once. The collapse embarrassed the Italian government internationally and became the canonical symbol of a site loved to pieces by its own popularity.

From 2012, the EU and the Italian government jointly funded the Great Pompeii Project (Grande Progetto Pompei), worth around 105 million euros, prioritising drainage, structural stabilisation and emergency conservation. In 2014, the Parco Archeologico di Pompei was granted autonomous management status, allowing it to reinvest visitor ticket revenue directly into conservation rather than depending solely on central government allocation, an attempt to turn tourism from a pure liability into a partial funding source for the fabric it wears down.