Leisure and Labor in a Pompeian Garden: The Casa Della Regina Carolina Project (VIII 3, 14), 2022 Field Season

The Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project documents an unusually configured house and excavates its large garden in order to explore the ways that planted space shaped Pompeian domestic life. The original domestic assemblage that was found in the 19th century, and only minimally described in existing publications, is now largely lost. In its absence, the garden provides one of our best opportunities to investigate some of the activities associated with this household, from elite leisure activities to labor performed by enslaved workers. We understand the household as a complex assemblage that included not only the built environment and the people who lived in it, but also the plants and animals that shared this patch of urban ecology. We thus ask how the simultaneously material and living worlds of Roman gardens shaped the social, economic, and ritual practices of their inhabitants.