Caitlín Barrett, associate professor of classics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Kathryn Gleason ’79, professor of landscape architecture in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, have been collaborating since 2016 on the excavation and survey of a large house and garden site, the Casa della Regina Carolina Project, at Pompeii in southern Italy. They are faculty members in the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS), which supports multidisciplinary partnerships on projects across colleges.
At the Pompeii site – where they also are collaborating with their colleague and co-director, professor Annalisa Marzano of the University of Reading – they are studying the relationships in this ancient Roman city between domestic material culture, social performance and historical change through the lens of daily household life.
How did your backgrounds and work bring you together?
Caitlín Barrett: Archaeology is an inherently collaborative, multidisciplinary field. There’s really no way to do an archaeological dig today without relying on the expertise of collaborators in many fields.
Before I started working with Kathy, I had a different research project at Pompeii. I was writing a book on Egyptian landscapes in Roman art and what they tell us about the relationship between Rome and Egypt. I hadn’t expected that project to turn into a book about Roman gardens! But it did – because, it turns out, that’s where paintings and mosaics of Egyptian landscapes were most often located at Pompeii: in domestic gardens.
That got me interested in the role of gardens in Roman households. Gardens occupy a kind of liminal space: they’re inside, but also outside; they’re part of the house, but they’re also not part of the house. So in some ways, they were spaces where people could engage in different activities and try out different identities than might be appropriate in other areas of the house. For example, foreign or exotic imagery (like the Egyptian scenes) is more common in gardens than elsewhere. And in contrast to some other rooms that were more about public display – like the atrium and tablinum, where people held business meetings at home – gardens were spaces for private relaxation with invited guests, where people could let their hair down a little more.
Once I started researching gardens, that brought me to Kathy, because she’s one of the world’s foremost experts on garden archaeology and has created new methodologies for excavating gardens. And so I was very lucky to wind up at Cornell where she happened to be.
Kathryn Gleason: I, too, have been studying East-West relations in the Mediterranean and had recently finished excavating a large garden at nearby Stabiae, also buried by Vesuvius.
I came to archaeology initially out of landscape architecture. As an undergraduate at Cornell, I became interested in the sophisticated representations of garden design in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Roman art.
So I went off on archaeological excavations in the late ’70s and early ’80s to see what archaeologists were finding when they got outside the walls of the buildings. And it turned out they usually turned around and went back inside. Few archaeologists outside of Pompeii had a concept that gardens could be preserved after 2,000 or more years – or had a cultural concept of gardens to drive scholarly investigation.
As a design historian, I’m very interested in how these gardens came to be – what was the intention of the owner in creating the garden? What can the remains of a garden tell us about how that original intention was transformed into the built garden?
