now regarded rather less like a time capsule than it was in the past.

In the twentieth century Vittorio Spinazzola (working from 1910 to 1923) and Amadeo Maiuri (from 1923 to 1961) cleared an enormous area of Pompeii, especially along one of the main streets of the town, the so-called Via dell’Abbondanza. Publication lagged badly behind, and Pompeii’s structures suffered disastrously (especially from 1940 onward) from pollution, theft, tourism, earthquakes, bombardment during World War II, and, most particularly, neglect. Since 1980 the pace of excavation has slowed considerably, and a large-scale restoration program has been undertaken using mainly traditional materials, rather than the inappropriate modern materials used in the past. The most recent projects have concentrated on previously excavated structures, documenting what remains of the buildings and decorations in an attempt to recover the finds and their contexts; to better understand the building history of the structures and the urban development of Pompeii, digging often extends below the a.d. 79 level.

Ted Robinson

References

Descoeudres, J.-P. 1994. Pompeii Revisited: The Life and Death of a Roman Town. Sydney, Australia.

Etienne, R. 1992. Pompeii: The Day a City Died. London: Thames and Hudson.

Wallace-Hadrill, A. 1994. Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press..

Zanker, P. 1998. Pompeii: Public and Private Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Popenoe, Dorothy Hughes

(1899–1932)

Trained as a botanist and a pioneer in the determination of cultural chronology in Honduran prehistory, Dorothy Hughes Popenoe conducted independent fieldwork in Honduras and sought the advice and sponsorship of A. M. Tozzer of the peabody museum at Harvard University. Her major works, published posthumously, dealt with the sites of Playa de los Muertos and Tenampúa in Honduras.

A brief memoir by Thomas Barbour, issued as an introduction to her posthumously published study of Antigua, guatemala, and an obituary by Alfred M. Tozzer in Maya Research provide sketchy details of Popenoe’s early life. She was born in Great Britain, and following World War I she worked as a technical illustrator at Kew Gardens in London. She developed enough expertise to establish new species of grasses in the scientific literature. Her relocation to Washington, D.C., in 1923 as an employee of the U.S. National Herbarium led to her marriage to Wilson Popenoe. Accompanying him to Honduras in 1925, after he accepted a position with the United Fruit Company, she began a brief but highly active career that was ended prematurely by her accidental death.

Popenoe’s earliest work, published with her husband in 1931, was the report of a site uncovered during construction of a botanical station at Lancetilla, near Tela on the Caribbean coast of northern Honduras in 1925. The report mixes a scientific format, a description of each category of data, with a speculative vignette about life at the site on the eve of Spanish conquest. Since both Wilson and Dorothy Popenoe were accomplished botanists, it is no surprise that they attempted to present the archaeological data according to the standards of the time, including the use of general taxonomies of material culture, especially of lithics, that implied time depth. But the site could not be placed in any real context because of a paucity of available literature on Honduran archaeology.

Dorothy Popenoe’s interest in archaeology was apparently engaged by this chance discovery. According to Barbour, she was determined not to be idle after her transfer to Honduras and had begun historical and ethnographic investigations. Following the Lancetilla excavations, she took a major step forward in archaeology by initiating excavations at Tenampúa in the Comayagua Valley in 1927, a fortified hilltop site that had been reported over fifty years earlier by American archaeologist E. G. Squier. Popenoe’s Spanish-language report (1928), reissued in English after her death by the smithsonian institution (1936), is most notable for drawing on sixteenth-century ethnohistoric documents in an attempt to identify the site.