The Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project, Pompeii: 2022–2023 Field Seasons

The Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project at Pompeii documents a large house, Pompeii VIII 3.14 (‘Casa della Regina Carolina’), and excavates its garden in order to explore the ways that Roman domestic gardens shaped the everyday experiences of the people who lived and worked within them. Following an earlier publication in FOLD&R of our first two field seasons (2018–2019), this article presents the results of our 2022–2023 field seasons. Our multidisciplinary research at this site is enabling us to reconstruct human-plant interactions in ancient Pompeii; to redraw the boundaries of the ‘Casa della Regina Carolina’, which we have found was connected in antiquity to the adjacent building VIII 3.15; and to reconsider the range of activities, potentially commercial as well as residential, that took place in the combined dwelling space of VIII 3.14-15. Our findings shed light on Roman gardens not only as spaces of elite socializing, but also labor and non-elite experience. Finally, we argue that gardens provide an opportunity to enrich discussions of material agency by enabling us to explore not only human-thing interactions, but also the activities and agency of domestic plants and animals.