roman scholar andrew wallace-hadrill.sted in ways of recapturing a picture of roman society as a whole. we've got great written sources for the romans, but with them there's always a suspicion that they represent the viewpoint of a thin upper crust. the great thing about pompeii is that, archaeologically, it preserves the full social spectrum from rich to poor. if you look at a standard plan of any part of pompeii, what you see is an extraordinary jumble of lines. and it's not until you start measuring and analyzing that a pattern emerges. what i've done is to group the houses according to size, from largest to smallest. what comes out is a jigsaw of tiny shops right next door to enormous mansions. here we have a shop -- one of dozens up and down pompeii. the way the eruption preserves things, you can tell exactly what was in these bins -- beans, chick peas, lentils... in fact, this guy was a grocer. the backyard here is full of empties -- amphorae which contained wine, olive oil and garum -- the unspeakable fish sauce wh