What is estelle Lazer's critique?

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.

What is the 2021 response?

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.

§-Syllabus dot point

NSWAncient HistorySyllabus dot point

What ethical issues arise from the study, display and ownership of Pompeii, Herculaneum and their human remains?

The ethical issues in the study, conservation, display and ownership of the sites and the human remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum, including the display of body casts and skeletons, tourism pressure versus conservation, looting and the antiquities trade, ownership questions, and responsible reconstruction and virtual display

A focused answer to the HSC Ancient History Core Study dot point on ethics, display and ownership. Lazer's critique of casts as "objects", tourism pressure versus conservation, the 2010 Schola Armaturarum collapse, looting and the antiquities trade, and the ownership debate between the Italian state and international scholarship.

Generated by Claude Opus 4.812 min answerUpdated 2026-07-01

Reviewed by: AI editorial process; not yet individually human-reviewed

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Quick answer

Pompeii and Herculaneum's ethics are a genuine four-way tension: the display of body casts and skeletons, criticised by Estelle Lazer as risking treatment of the dead as "objects" and answered partly by the 2021 Antiquarium rehang; tourism pressure (around 2.5 to 4 million visitors a year pre-2020) against fragile conservation, which collided in the 6 November 2010 Schola Armaturarum collapse and the resulting EU-funded Great Pompeii Project from 2012; looting and the antiquities trade, which destroys stratigraphic evidence even when objects survive; and a contested ownership question between the Italian state (the 2004 Codice dei Beni Culturali, 1997 UNESCO listing), internationally funded scholarship (Wallace-Hadrill's Herculaneum Conservation Project since 2001), and an emerging "dignity of the dead" framing that Lazer and Levin-Richardson apply even in the absence of a living descendant community.

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What this dot point is asking
The answer
How to read a source on this topic
Historians on ethics, display and ownership

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to weigh the competing ethical claims that surround Pompeii and Herculaneum today: the dignity owed to the AD 79 dead when their casts and skeletons are studied and displayed, the pressure that mass tourism places on conservation, the threat of looting and the illicit antiquities trade, the contested question of who "owns" the sites and their evidence, and whether reconstruction (physical or virtual) can responsibly bridge the gap between engaging visitors and preserving the fabric. This dot point asks for a JUDGEMENT across four pulling forces, not a description of any one of them.

In plain English

Imagine a museum that is also a real crime scene, a tourist attraction, a scientific laboratory and a cemetery, all at once, all in the same 44 hectares. Nearly two million tourists used to walk through it every year before 2020, wearing down two-thousand-year-old floors just by existing. Scientists want to CT-scan the plaster casts of the dead to learn about ancient diet and disease. Tour groups want a good photo of a body frozen mid-scream. Thieves occasionally pocket a loose stone or tile and, spooked by stories of a curse, mail it back years later with an apology note. And somewhere underneath all of that is the plain fact that the "objects" on display used to be people who suffocated or burned to death in a single afternoon.

Nobody owns all of that cleanly. Italy owns the land and the law. International experts and donors pay for a lot of the conservation and bring the archaeology up to modern standards. And a growing number of historians argue that the dead themselves, who never agreed to be plaster-cast, scanned or photographed, deserve a kind of respect that outranks all of the above. The exam wants you to hold all three claims at once and say which one should win, and when.

The answer

The display of body casts and skeletons

Fiorelli's plaster cast technique (1863) and the 1980-1982 recovery of around 340 skeletons from the Herculaneum boat sheds turned Pompeii and Herculaneum into two of the most visually confronting archaeological sites in the world. For over a century, casts were typically displayed in simple glass cases with little interpretive framing, presented to visitors primarily as dramatic images of the eruption's final moments.

Estelle Lazer's critique: 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.
Consent: 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 2021 response: 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.

Tourism pressure versus conservation

Visitor numbers at Pompeii grew steadily through the early 21st century: around 2.5 million a year in the late 2000s, rising to a record of around 3.9 million in 2019 (illustrative, Italian Ministry of Culture / Parco Archeologico di Pompei reporting), before collapsing to a fraction of that during the 2020 pandemic closures and recovering strongly by 2023. Foot traffic, humidity and vibration from millions of annual visitors accelerate the decay of plaster, fresco and masonry that survived nearly two millennia buried, but only decades exposed to the open air.

The 2010 Schola Armaturarum collapse. 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.

The Great Pompeii Project. 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.

Looting and the antiquities trade

Around one-third of Pompeii (about 22 hectares) remains unexcavated, leaving it, and the wider Vesuvian region's less-guarded sites, vulnerable to illegal digging by "tombaroli" (tomb robbers). Looting destroys stratigraphic context, the exact position and association of an object with the layers and objects around it, even when the object itself survives, so the archaeological EVIDENCE is lost even if the artefact is later recovered.

Looted material has historically moved through intermediaries into the international antiquities market, sometimes laundered through private collections or auction houses before reaching a buyer. The Carabinieri Comando Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (TPC), a specialist Italian police unit founded in 1969, investigates trafficking and has recovered and repatriated looted material to Italy. Smaller-scale but persistent theft by tourists (souvenir stones and tesserae) produces the widely reported "Pompeii curse" phenomenon: visitors mailing back stolen fragments years later, citing bad luck, a minor but telling symptom of the same underlying problem, that removing material from the site erases its evidentiary value.

Ownership: the state, scholarship, and the dead

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.

A third, non-legal ownership claim has emerged through the ethics literature: a "dignity of the dead" framing. Unlike Indigenous Australian or Egyptian repatriation debates, where descendant communities can assert a direct claim, the AD 79 victims have no identifiable living descendants to consult. Scholars including Lazer and Levin-Richardson instead apply the same ethical vocabulary, consent, agency and respect, used in those descendant-community debates to a broader principle: that the ancient dead, regardless of how distant, are owed a duty of care exercised by scholarship itself rather than by blood descent. The World Archaeological Congress's 1989 Vermillion Accord, a general statement on the ethical treatment of human remains in archaeological practice, supplies a comparative benchmark for this reasoning, even though it long predates and was not written specifically for the Vesuvian sites.

Responsible reconstruction and virtual display

Physical reconstruction has a troubled history at the Core Study sites. Amedeo Maiuri's 1930s use of reinforced concrete and steel to rebuild roofs and upper storeys at Herculaneum saved some structures from collapse in the short term but, as the 2010 Schola Armaturarum collapse showed, could trap moisture and accelerate decay over decades. Since 2001, the Herculaneum Conservation Project has favoured anastylosis (reassembling original fallen elements with new, reversible fasteners) and conservation-in-place over new construction.

Digital and virtual reconstruction offers a lower-risk alternative. The Swedish Pompeii Project has used photogrammetry and 3D modelling (since 2000) to record standing remains non-destructively, including areas too fragile or unstable for regular public access. Virtual models let a global audience experience collapsed, buried or restricted-access spaces without adding physical wear, and can be updated as new excavation (such as the 2014 to ongoing Regio V work) reveals more of the site, without committing archaeologists to a single, possibly wrong, physical reconstruction of what a lost structure looked like.

Fiorelli's regio system, the 1980-1982 Herculaneum boat shed excavation, and the ongoing Regio V discoveries all sit inside the "Research and scholarship" node above; the ethics dot point is really asking how that node's demand for evidence is balanced against the other three.

Tourism pressure, in numbers

How to read a source on this topic

Section I sources on ethics and ownership typically include photographs of casts in display cases, drone or news footage of the Schola Armaturarum collapse, museum interpretive panels, park visitor statistics, or extracts from Lazer's or Wallace-Hadrill's writing. Three reading habits.

First, ask who the source's practice benefits and who it might harm. A glass-case photograph of a cast benefits the visitor's experience but says nothing about the anthropological or dignity considerations behind the display choice; a curatorial statement reveals the institution's reasoning, which the photograph alone cannot.

Second, date the ethical stance, not just the event. A 19th- or early 20th-century display practice reflects a period before human-remains ethics were widely debated; a 2021 Antiquarium panel reflects a post-Lazer, post-Levin-Richardson consciousness. The same cast, photographed forty years apart, can illustrate two different ethical eras.

Third, resist picking a single "villain." A source criticising tourism, looting, or reconstruction is usually arguing for one legitimate interest (dignity, scholarship, or access) over another, not exposing simple wrongdoing; a strong answer names the competing interest the source is choosing to prioritise.

Historians on ethics, display and ownership

Estelle Lazer (Resurrecting Pompeii, 2009) is the central modern authority: her anthropological methodology models rigorous, respectful study of the casts and skeletons, and her critique of casual display as treating the dead as "objects" underpins most current debate about dignity in presentation.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Herculaneum: Past and Future, 2011) argues for conservation over reconstruction, framing the Herculaneum Conservation Project's anastylosis and reversible interventions as the ethically and practically sounder response to fragile remains, in contrast to Maiuri's earlier concrete reconstructions.

Sarah Levin-Richardson (2019) extends the dignity argument to contextually sensitive material, urging particular caution about publicly displaying remains and objects recovered from settings such as the Lupanare, where display risks compounding indignity.

Mary Beard (Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, 2008) treats Pompeii as a living town rather than a frozen snapshot, a framing that implicitly supports careful, contextualised display over spectacle, and has publicly discussed the tension between tourism access and conservation need.

I flag one point for the lead to double check: I have treated the World Archaeological Congress's 1989 Vermillion Accord as a general comparative ethics benchmark rather than a document written specifically about Pompeii; please verify this framing reads as intended before publication.

Common exam traps

Treating ethics as only about human remains: The dot point also covers tourism pressure, looting, ownership and reconstruction. A strong answer touches at least two of the four strands, not just casts and skeletons.
Citing tourism as purely destructive: Since the 2014 autonomous-status reform, ticket revenue has funded conservation. Tourism is BOTH a pressure and, increasingly, part of the funding solution.
Confusing looting with legitimate excavation: Looting removes objects without documentation and destroys stratigraphic evidence even if the object survives. Regio V excavation under Osanna and Zuchtriegel is licensed, recorded archaeology, not looting.
Assuming a descendant community exists: Unlike some other heritage-ethics contexts, the AD 79 victims have no identifiable living descendants; the "dignity" argument at Pompeii is built on a general ethical principle, not on a consulted community, and top answers note this difference explicitly.

Model exam responses

1. Source-analysis response (origin/usefulness/reliability). "Source B, a 2019 opinion piece calling for the Antiquarium's reflective display approach to be extended across the site, is useful evidence of a live professional debate that predates and likely helped motivate the 2021 rehang of the 'Pompeii Couple' cast. Its reliability is limited by its persuasive purpose: as an advocacy piece, it is likely to overstate the 'spectacle' problem of older display practice to strengthen its argument. Corroborated against Estelle Lazer's more measured scholarly critique in Resurrecting Pompeii (2009), which makes a comparable argument from anthropological rather than polemical grounds, the source's substance holds up even though its tone should be read as one advocate's voice, not a neutral survey."

Marker's note: markers reward a clear origin/motive line, BALANCED usefulness and limitation, and corroboration with a named historian rather than mere description of the opinion piece's content.

2. Essay paragraph (dignity built into tourism and scholarship). "The clearest sign that dignity has become a design principle rather than an afterthought is the 2014 grant of autonomous management status to the Parco Archeologico di Pompei, which let the park reinvest record visitor revenue, 3.9 million visitors by 2019, directly into the stabilisation work exposed as inadequate by the 2010 collapse of the Schola Armaturarum. Read alongside the 2021 Antiquarium rehang of the 'Pompeii Couple' cast, which replaced an unexplained glass case with a contextualised, humanising display, these changes show tourism revenue and dignity-conscious curation working together rather than against each other, a partnership Wallace-Hadrill's Herculaneum Conservation Project models on the conservation side through internationally funded anastylosis rather than reconstruction."

Marker's note: this paragraph scores because it sustains an argument (dignity built into, not opposed to, tourism and conservation funding), deploys precise dated evidence, and integrates a named historian (Wallace-Hadrill) as part of the argument.

3. Short-answer response (the ownership question). "Legal ownership of Pompeii and Herculaneum rests with the Italian state under the 2004 Codice dei Beni Culturali, reinforced by the sites' 1997 UNESCO listing, but functional stewardship has always depended on internationally funded scholarship, most clearly 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. Neither claimant alone has delivered the conservation the sites need; the practical answer to 'who owns the past' has been a negotiated partnership, not a single custodian."

Marker's note: markers reward naming the legal instrument, the named international project with its funders, and an explicit statement that ownership functions as a partnership rather than a single answer.

Command words and technique

Watch the command word. "Assess" / "evaluate" / "to what extent" demand a sustained JUDGEMENT across the competing interests (dignity, tourism, scholarship, state ownership), not a description of each in turn: state your verdict early and defend it in every paragraph. For a source-analysis item, always work through origin, motive and audience before usefulness AND limitations, then corroborate with own knowledge and, where possible, a named historian (Lazer, Wallace-Hadrill, Levin-Richardson, Beard). For "outline" or "explain," name the specific date and figure (6 November 2010; around 105 million euros; 2014 autonomous status) rather than a vague gesture at "conservation problems." Weave historiography as argument, "Lazer's critique shows... but the 2021 rehang suggests...", rather than dropping a name at the end of a paragraph.

Practice questions

Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.

foundation3 marksOutline TWO ethical concerns raised by the display of body casts and skeletons at Pompeii and Herculaneum.

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A 3-mark "outline" needs two distinct, developed points.

Concern 1: dignity of the dead. The casts and skeletons are the physical remains of real individuals who died in the AD 79 eruption. Estelle Lazer (Resurrecting Pompeii, 2009) criticises display and media treatment that reduces casts to sensational "objects" or curiosities, arguing they deserve the same anthropological and ethical care as any human remains.

Concern 2: consent. The dead could never consent to plaster casting, CT scanning, DNA sampling, or public display. This is structurally different from consenting living research subjects and raises the same "consent-less study" problem debated in other heritage contexts (e.g. Indigenous or Egyptian human remains).

Markers reward two distinct, developed concerns rather than one repeated point.

foundation4 marksExplain why the growth in tourist numbers at Pompeii created pressure on conservation in the years before 2020.

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A 4-mark "explain" needs a clear cause-and-effect chain with figures.

The pressure: Pompeii's annual visitor numbers grew from around 2.5 million in the late 2000s to a record of around 3.9 million in 2019 (illustrative, Italian Ministry of Culture / Parco Archeologico di Pompei reporting). Foot traffic, humidity from crowds, and vibration erode ancient plaster, fresco and masonry that was never engineered for millions of annual visitors.
The consequence: Site management (drainage, roofing, structural bracing) was chronically underfunded relative to the scale of the excavated area (around 44 hectares open to the public), while only a fraction of buildings could be actively monitored. The 2010 collapse of the Schola Armaturarum, a gladiators' barracks on the Via dell'Abbondanza, showed the cost of this mismatch: a 1930s reinforced-concrete repair had trapped moisture, and heavy rain combined with decades of deferred maintenance brought the building down.
The response: The collapse embarrassed the Italian government internationally and triggered the EU and Italian government-funded Great Pompeii Project (Grande Progetto Pompei) from 2012, worth around 105 million euros, aimed at drainage and structural stabilisation across the site.

Markers reward the visitor figures, the named 2010 collapse, and the funded response, linked causally rather than listed.

core5 marksSOURCE-BASED. Source A (owned paraphrase): a 2019 Parco Archeologico di Pompei annual report notes a record 3.9 million visitors that year, alongside ongoing structural stabilisation works funded under the Great Pompeii Project across the Regio V and Via dell'Abbondanza areas. Using Source A and your own knowledge, explain the relationship between tourism pressure and conservation investment at Pompeii since 2010.

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A 5-mark "explain" with a source needs the source USED plus own knowledge.

Use the source: Source A shows the two forces occurring together in 2019: record visitor numbers (3.9 million) and active, funded stabilisation works. This is not a coincidence; the report links continued high visitation to the need for continued conservation spending in the same areas tourists move through.
Own knowledge: the trigger: The relationship was forged by the 6 November 2010 collapse of the Schola Armaturarum after heavy rain, which exposed decades of underfunded maintenance beneath rising visitor numbers and forced the Italian and EU governments to fund the Great Pompeii Project (from 2012, around 105 million euros).
Own knowledge: the outcome: Conservation investment and new archaeological work (the 2014 to ongoing Regio V excavations under Massimo Osanna, then Gabriel Zuchtriegel) have run alongside, not instead of, tourism growth; the 2014 grant of autonomous management status to the Parco Archeologico di Pompei let the park reinvest ticket revenue directly into stabilisation rather than relying solely on central government allocation.
Qualify it: Tourism is now framed as a partial SOLUTION (self-funding conservation through ticket revenue) as well as a pressure, though the underlying tension between visitor access and fragile fabric remains.

Markers reward explicit use of the source's figures, the named 2010 trigger, and the funding mechanism.

core6 marksSOURCE ANALYSIS. Source B (owned paraphrase): in a 2019 opinion piece, an archaeologist argues that displaying plaster casts of eruption victims in glass cases without explanatory context risks reducing the dead to macabre spectacle for photographs, and calls for the more reflective, contextualised approach used in the 2021 Antiquarium rehang of the 'Pompeii Couple' cast to be extended across the site. Assess the usefulness and reliability of Source B for a historian investigating the ethics of displaying human remains at Pompeii.

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A 6-mark source-analysis task needs balanced usefulness AND reliability, anchored in origin/motive/audience, plus own knowledge and a named historian.

Origin, motive, audience: Source B is a 2019 opinion piece by a practising archaeologist, published for a public readership rather than as peer-reviewed scholarship. It is explicitly advocacy: written to persuade site managers to change display practice, not a neutral survey of current arrangements.
Usefulness: The source is genuinely useful as evidence of a live professional debate BEFORE the 2021 Antiquarium reopening, showing that dissatisfaction with older "cabinet of curiosities" style display predates and likely helped motivate that change. It names a concrete comparator (the pre-2021 display of the Pompeii Couple) that a historian can check against.
Reliability: Reliability is limited because it is a single practitioner's opinion, not a survey of visitor or scholarly opinion, and its persuasive purpose means it likely overstates the "spectacle" problem to strengthen its case. It should be corroborated against Estelle Lazer's more measured scholarly critique (Resurrecting Pompeii, 2009) and against the park's own 2021 curatorial statements.
Historian: Lazer's position, that casts must be studied and displayed with the same anthropological and ethical rigour owed to any human remains rather than treated as sensational "objects", both supports the source's substance and shows it is one voice within an established scholarly critique, not an isolated view.

Markers reward origin/motive/audience analysis, BALANCED usefulness and limitations, corroboration, and Lazer named as argument.

core5 marksExplain how looting and the illicit antiquities trade threaten the study and ownership of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

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A 5-mark "explain" needs a mechanism, not a list.

The threat to study: Around one-third of Pompeii (about 22 hectares) remains unexcavated, and looting by illegal diggers (Italian "tombaroli") removes objects from their stratigraphic context before archaeologists can record it. Once an object is pulled from the ground without documentation, the evidence it could have given about date, findspot and association with other objects is destroyed even if the object itself survives.
The mechanism: Small, portable, high-value items (coins, bronzes, wall-painting fragments, jewellery) are the main targets, sold through intermediaries into the international antiquities market, sometimes laundered through auction houses or private collections before reaching a buyer.
The response: The Carabinieri Comando Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (TPC), a specialist Italian police unit, investigates trafficking and has recovered and repatriated looted material to Italy, while the 2004 Codice dei Beni Culturali e del Paesaggio vests ownership of undiscovered antiquities in the Italian state, making unlicensed excavation and export illegal.
The ownership dimension: Looting also undercuts the state's claim to be the proper custodian of the site, since it demonstrates gaps in protection, and complicates international scholarship's access, since heightened security and export controls (introduced partly in response to looting) can slow legitimate loans and research.

Markers reward the stratigraphic-context mechanism, a named enforcement body, and the ownership link.

exam20 marksESSAY. To what extent should the display and conservation of Pompeii and Herculaneum be shaped by the dignity owed to the dead, rather than by the demands of tourism and international scholarship?

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A band-6 essay sustains a judgement on "to what extent," marshals specific dated evidence, and weaves historiography. This is a PLAN plus a model paragraph.

Thesis: Dignity, tourism and scholarship are not simply opposed; the strongest recent practice (the 2021 Antiquarium rehang, the Herculaneum Conservation Project's conservation-in-place ethos) shows dignity can be built INTO tourism and scholarship rather than sacrificed to them, though real tensions remain unresolved, particularly over consent-less scientific sampling of remains.
Argument line 1: the case that dignity has been subordinated: From Fiorelli's first casts (1863) to mass 20th-century tourism, casts and skeletons were displayed in glass cases largely as spectacle, with minimal interpretive context; Lazer (Resurrecting Pompeii, 2009) documents this treatment of the dead as "objects" for public consumption rather than as individuals.
Argument line 2: the corrective, and its limits: The 2021 reopening of the Antiquarium repositioned the "Pompeii Couple" cast in a more reflective, contextualised display, and Sarah Levin-Richardson (2019) has pushed for particular caution around remains from sexually charged contexts such as the Lupanare. Yet CT scanning (since around 2015) and strontium isotope analysis (since around 2010) continue to study the dead without any possibility of consent, showing that scientific and educational value still routinely outweighs dignity concerns in practice.
Argument line 3: tourism and scholarship as partners, not only threats: The 2014 grant of autonomous status let the Parco Archeologico di Pompei reinvest visitor revenue into the conservation exposed as inadequate by the 2010 Schola Armaturarum collapse, funding the Great Pompeii Project (from 2012, around 105 million euros) and the new Regio V excavations. Wallace-Hadrill's Herculaneum Conservation Project (since 2001) shows international, donor-funded scholarship (the Packard Humanities Institute) directly serving conservation rather than competing with it.
Model paragraph (argument line 2): The clearest sign that dignity has become a genuine design principle, not an afterthought, is the 2021 Antiquarium rehang of the "Pompeii Couple" cast, moved from an unadorned glass case into a display that foregrounds the individuals' final moments with explanatory, humanising context. Yet the same period saw CT scanning and isotope analysis extended across the cast collection precisely because the dead cannot object, which is, as Lazer's work implies, the uncomfortable core of the problem: scientific and educational value are judged by the living, for the living, and the dead have no vote in the calculation.
Conclusion: Dignity has increasingly been built into display and funded conservation, but scientific study of non-consenting remains means the tension is managed, not resolved. Judgement sustained.

Marker's note: band 6 answers ANSWER the "to what extent" with a clear verdict, deploy precise dated evidence (2010, 2014, 2021), and integrate Lazer and Wallace-Hadrill as argument, not decoration. A chronological retelling without a sustained verdict caps the response at mid-band.

exam25 marksESSAY. Evaluate the extent to which ownership of Pompeii and Herculaneum's past should rest with the Italian state, international scholarship, or a wider 'dignity of the dead' framing borrowed from repatriation ethics elsewhere.

Show worked solution →

A band-6 essay sustains a judgement on "evaluate the extent," marshals specific dated evidence, and weaves historiography. This is a PLAN plus a model paragraph.

Thesis: Legal ownership properly rests with the Italian state under the 2004 Codice dei Beni Culturali, but effective stewardship in practice is, and should remain, a negotiated partnership among the state, internationally funded scholarship, and an emerging ethic of dignity toward the dead; no single claimant can meet all three demands of protection, knowledge and respect alone.
Argument line 1: the case for Italian state ownership: Pompeii and Herculaneum were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997, and Italian law vests ownership of the sites and undiscovered antiquities in the state; the Parco Archeologico di Pompei, granted autonomous management in 2014, is the sovereign custodian, and the Carabinieri TPC actively prosecutes looting and trafficking as theft from the state, not merely as an academic loss.
Argument line 2: the case for international scholarship's stake: Excavation and conservation since the 18th century have depended on international expertise and funding: Karl Weber's careful 1750s recording, the Swedish Pompeii Project's digital survey since 2000, and above all 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. Global scholarship treats the site as part of a shared human heritage that no single state can be expected to fund or interpret unaided.
Argument line 3: the 'dignity of the dead' framing, imported and adapted: Unlike Indigenous Australian or Egyptian repatriation debates, the AD 79 victims have no identifiable living descendant community to consult; yet Estelle Lazer's insistence on anthropological rigour and Sarah Levin-Richardson's caution about contextually sensitive remains import the same ethical vocabulary, agency, consent and dignity, used elsewhere for descendant communities, applying it instead to a universal claim that the dead of any era deserve respectful treatment regardless of blood descent. The World Archaeological Congress's 1989 Vermillion Accord, a general statement on respecting the dead in archaeological practice, supplies the comparative ethical benchmark even though it was not written with Pompeii specifically in mind.
Model paragraph (argument line 3): Because the victims of AD 79 left no descendants to assert a claim of the kind Indigenous Australian or Egyptian repatriation movements can make, it might seem that dignity has no institutional voice at Pompeii at all; in practice, scholars have supplied that voice by analogy. Lazer's insistence that casts be studied and displayed as human remains rather than curiosities, and Levin-Richardson's caution around material from the Lupanare, both borrow the ethical grammar of consent and respect from repatriation debates elsewhere and apply it to victims two thousand years removed from any living claimant. This is a genuinely new kind of ownership claim, exercised not by blood descent but by a general duty of care that scholarship has assigned to itself.
Conclusion: Legal title sits with Italy, functional stewardship depends on international scholarship's expertise and funding, and dignity now operates as a third, non-legal claim exercised through professional ethics rather than descent. Judgement sustained.

Marker's note: band 6 answers weigh all three claimants explicitly, name the legal instrument (2004 Codice dei Beni Culturali), the funded international project (Wallace-Hadrill, since 2001), and the dignity framing (Lazer, Levin-Richardson, the Vermillion Accord), and reach a sustained verdict rather than simply describing each claimant in turn.