Pompeii

The BBC's three parts on the Regio IX excavation, filmed as it happened, so you watch rooms come out of the ash. The best Pompeii documentary made this century.

Ninety-seven minutes inside the first new dig at Pompeii in seventy years, filmed with the archaeologists while the finds come out of the ash. The DNA work on the victims is what lifts it past a tour of the ruins.

Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Roman episodes are indexed

With Jessica Venner

Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Ancients

With Jessica Venner

The eruption hour by hour, and the argument about the date: the traditional 24 August has been under attack since a charcoal inscription turned up in 2018 pointing at October.

Part of The Ancients

With Andrew Wallace-Hadrill

The other town, better preserved, less visited, and with carbonised scrolls that are now being read by particle accelerator.

One hour, real people reconstructed from the bodies in the ash, and a volcanic timeline you can set your watch by. The scene everyone remembers is the pyroclastic surge, and it earns it.

Beard on the excavation as it happens, with the bodies treated as people. The section on what the casts can and cannot tell us is the honest counterweight to every dramatised eruption.

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Partial Historians

With Ray Laurence

Ray Laurence on Pompeii as a working town: traffic, shopfronts and street life, with the casts left aside. Fifty-five minutes on the city before the ash.

Part of The Partial Historians

With Jessica Venner

Jess Venner on the graffiti and the people who left it, from election slogans to insults. Fifty-four minutes on the writing on Pompeian walls.

Part of The Ancients

With Gabriel Zuchtriegel

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, who runs the site, on what the current excavations are turning up and on what a director decides to leave buried. Fifty-two minutes.

Italian archaeologists opening a Pompeian street, roadside food counter and all. Fifty-two minutes on how the town ate and moved, which is the half the death casts crowd out.

Part of The Ancients

Fifty-one minutes on a find from the Great Pompeii Project, in a suburban villa some seven hundred metres from the walls. Excavation there is still producing new bodies.

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

The eruption of 79 is the famous one; this is about the one eighteen centuries before it, which buried a Bronze Age settlement on the same mountain. Forty-seven minutes, and it turns Vesuvius from a single catastrophe into a habit.

Part of The Rest Is History

Forty-six minutes on the eruption of AD 79, a column of gas and ash some twenty-one miles high and the surges that came down the mountain after it collapsed.

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Ancients

Forty minutes on the eruption of AD 79 itself, hour by hour, in the series the show built around the town. Carries a warning for the descriptions of how people died.

Part of The Ancients

The Pompeii Lakshmi, carved in India and dug out of a house near the Bay of Naples. Thirty-nine minutes on the trade route that could carry an object that far.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-nine minutes on the gladiator barracks and the graffiti scratched by the men who lived there, which record wins, losses and admirers by name.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Sophie Hay, Steven Ellis

Thirty-nine minutes on two hundred and fifty years of digging, from treasure hunting under the Bourbons to the casts and the current slow work.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-eight minutes on what is still coming out of the ground, in a town first opened in the sixteenth century and still producing finds most weeks.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-seven minutes on the evidence for brothels in Pompeii, and on how much of it is a modern habit of reading every carved phallus as a signpost.

Part of The Ancients

Thirty-five minutes on the vineyards replanted inside Pompeii's walls from the root cavities the ash preserved, which is how anyone knows what was growing there.

Part of The Ancients

Episode one of the series, thirty-five minutes on the town as a working place before AD 79: the elections painted on walls, the bakeries, the water supply.

Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard

Lucius Caecilius Iucundus lent money, ran auctions and took a cut of both, and his business archive survived the ash on wax tablets. Twenty-eight minutes on Pompeii's middleman.

Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ancient Rome Live

The amphitheatre riot of AD 59 between Pompeians and Nucerians, which Rome punished with a ten-year ban on games. Seventeen minutes, and there is a fresco of it painted by someone who was in the town.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Fourteen minutes on an emperor whose short reign was almost entirely disaster relief.

Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Eight minutes on the macellum, the covered market hall, traced from Pompeii to Jerash in Jordan. The plan barely changes between the two, which are two thousand kilometres apart.

Part of The Ancients

Dura-Europos was buried under a Sasanian siege ramp and rediscovered in 1920 with its synagogue and its church still painted. Forty-nine minutes.