Pompeii: Art, Industry and Infrastructure

By Kevin Cole and Miko Flohr

Even after more than 250 years since its discovery, Pompeii continues to resonate powerfully in both academic discourse and the popular imagination. This volume brings together a collection of ten papers that advance, challenge and revise the present conceptions of the city's art, industry and infrastructure. The discussions of domestic art in this book, a perennial topic for Pompeian scholars, engage previously neglected subjects such as wall ornaments in domestic decoration, the sculpture collection in the house of Octavius Quartio, and the role of the covered walkways in luxury villa architecture. The famous cupid's frieze from the house of the Vettii is given a novel and intelligent reinterpretation. The place of industry at Pompeii, in both the physical and economic landscapes has long been overlooked. The chapters on building practice in inhabited houses, on the presence of fulling workshops in atrium houses, and on the urban pottery industry serve as successful contributions to a more complete understanding of the life of the ancient city. Finally, this volume breaks new ground in the consideration of the urban infrastructure of Pompeii, a topic that has won serious attention only in the last decades, but one that is playing an increasingly central role in Pompeian studies. The final three chapters offer a reassessment of the Pompeian street network, a scientific analysis of the amount of lead in Pompeian drinking water, and a thorough analysis of the water infrastructure around the forum that supported its architectural transformation in the last decades before the eruption of mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Apr 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781842175972

Book preview

Introduction

Eric Poehler, Miko Flohr and Kevin Cole

Pompeii is the great laboratory of the Roman archaeologist. The breadth and the detail of the evidence that the city preserves has made it, along with Rome and a handful of companion sites, an essential archetype for Roman archaeology writ large. It is therefore of great importance that we continually reconsider how we investigate, analyze and interpret this vast resource. Wallace-Hadrill (1994, 64) famously remarked twenty years ago that Pompeii is at once the most studied and the least understood of sites. Universally familiar, its excavation and scholarship prove a nightmare of omissions and disasters. Each generation discovers with horror the extent to which information has been ignored, neglected, destroyed and left unreported and unpublished. The present academic generation is the first to have been trained with this quotation as its reality and is the first to understand its pessimism as a call to action. In fact, although a discrepancy still exists between the vast amount of data available for study and the limited body of evidence upon which our common scholarly perception of the site are largely based, the balance is shifting. Scholars have become increasingly aware of the need for an approach to Pompeii informed by an increasing number of perspectives and constrained by an evergrowing dataset (Trigger 1998, 23). As a response, there are now several trends and developments that point to an optimistic future for the study of this ancient city.

The last three decades have seen a rise in systematic and detailed investigation and subsequent publication of complete houses, insulae and other urban areas, often as part of large, long-running fieldwork projects, such as the German Haüser in Pompeji series (e.g., Strocka 1984; 1991; Ehrhardt 1988; 1998; Seiler 1992) and the British project in the insula of the Menander (Ling 1997; Allison 2006). The volumes of the Pompei: Pitture e Mosaici series (PPM) have given scholars convenient access to pictures, plans and drawings of almost every excavated building on the site. The 1990s saw a virtual reawakening of scholarship on Pompeii, including the work of Paul Zanker (1988; 1995; 1998), Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (1994), Ray Laurence (1994; 2007), John Dobbins (1994; 2007), Jens-Arne Dickmann (1999), and Penelope Allison (1994; 1995; 2001; 2004; 2006) who have critically evaluated traditional methods and approaches and have provided new and credible models for the interpretation of material remains. Over the past two decades, the number and scale of Italian and foreign research projects at Pompeii have increased almost annually. The establishment of the Rivista di Studi Pompeiani and the series of volumes edited by the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei has created a forum that allows researchers to publish detailed studies and specialist datasets and make them widely available. A continuous series of conferences, workshops, panels and sessions attest to the persistent and increasing scholarly interest in Pompeii. Simultaneously, the digital revolution has, perforce, created the tools for rapid information exchange, remote interaction within any ever-growing scholarly community, and the ability to store immense amounts of data. The sum of material directly accessible on the internet keeps expanding at an exponential rate, including hard-to-find nineteenth century guides and excavation reports. Online journals such as FOLD&R (http://www.fastionline.org/folder.php) provide a platform for scholars to publish fieldwork reports quickly and allow rapid worldwide dissemination of information. These developments and others are radically transforming Pompeian scholarship. At the same time, there is an increasing awareness of methodological and theoretical problems related to Pompeian studies and these problems are being more explicitly and elaborately addressed at conferences and in print. Our ideas about many aspects of the city and its history have already profoundly changed, and current developments suggest that considerably more changes are to follow. We are now sitting at a unique and exciting cross-road in the academic history of Pompeii.

The present volume reflects these developments and is written by a generation of scholars that is among the first to profit from the number of publications and amount of discussion that has been produced over the last decades. It was born at the 108th annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Diego, early in 2007, but it is not a conference proceedings. Rather, the genesis of the volume came from the sudden awareness by the contributors that there was more than similarity amongst the papers, that there was an undercurrent in the dialog that resonated throughout the presentations on Pompeian topics that year. Such commonality was not only between the papers in the Pompeii session, but also from other talks in disparate sessions. These papers incorporated many of the ideas and methodologies pioneered in the 1990s, but pushed them further by combining them or by applying them to new data. In the long and fruitful discussions that followed the sessions we came to understand that within our new, individual ideas we shared a common outlook about how the archaeological record of the Vesuvian area should be approached in the early twenty-first century. For this reason, in editing the volume, we have encouraged the authors to make use of each others insights and to relate their own observations with those of the other contributors.

Thus, although each of the ten chapters focuses on its own specific evidence and raises its own specific research questions, there is considerable overlap in critical notions acknowledged and methodological approaches employed. As far as the topics discussed in this volume are concerned, three main themes emerged. The first four chapters may be categorized under the heading ‘art’. While these chapters deal with a familiar theme that has long been central to the field of Pompeian studies, they approach it with a renewed energy and make clear that there is still considerable room for innovative work within the area of domestic art and architecture. This is particularly true for the methods of study and interpretation. The three subsequent chapters deal with the more down-to-earth sides of urban life related to work, industry, and the economy. More importantly, these papers approach categories of material and sets of questions that have been severely neglected over the last two and half centuries and make clear that aspects of everyday life have much to add to our understanding of Pompeii in the last years of its existence. The final three chapters move away from private concerns and discuss aspects of the archaeological record related to the public infrastructure of Pompeii, which is an area of research that, until fairly recently, was also often overlooked by Pompeianists. New methods and more thorough analyses of the material evidence have made it possible to develop unique insights into the realm of infrastructure and planning.

Yet, while we decided to assign each contribution to one of these three categories, the reader will notice that many contributions overlap the boundaries of the other categories. Indeed, several could easily have found a place in one of the other sections, thus emphasizing the degree to which the contributions are interrelated. Moreover, because of the scholarly basis shared by most authors, there are some themes and problems that recur throughout the book. The most important of these is conception of the situation in Pompeii in the decades preceding the 79 AD eruption. There is, of course, an old, but still unsettled debate about seismic activity in the Bay of Naples area in the 60s and 70s of the first century AD. At the core of this debate were literary references to two major earthquakes in the early 60s AD in the works of Seneca, Tacitus and Suetonius (Sen. Q Nat. 6.1; 6.26–27; Tac. Ann. 15.22; 15.33–34; Suet. Ner. 20.2), later supplemented with epigraphic evidence for post-earthquake reconstruction works discovered in both Pompeii and Herculaneum (CIL X, 846; 1406). It is thought that one large earthquake struck Pompeii and its surroundings in 62 or 63 AD and that another one hit the city of Naples a year or so later, and that there is an uncertain amount of smaller and larger seismic events that did not make it to the literary record (Fröhlich and Jacobelli 1995; Allison 2004, 182–196). While this debate continues (cf. Wallace-Hadrill 2003), the more relevant question for the present volume is the impact of these earthquakes on the archaeological record of Pompeii and on the social life in the Vesuvian area in the third quarter of the first century AD. During this period, seismic activity was a factor to be reckoned with and smaller and larger earthquakes were, as suggested by Pliny in his letter to Tacitus, a more or less normal fact of life in the Bay of Naples (Plin. Ep. 6.16). Most authors in the present volume are unimpeded by the lack of consensus on this issue, focusing instead on the changed circumstances of life in the aftermath of the seismic activity, whatever its chronology. Indeed, Maiuri’s old idea of post-earthquake Pompeii as a city in steady decline awaiting its doom (Maiuri 1942) finds little support. Instead, the contributors to this volume identify and explore a wider array of responses to both the physical damage to the city and the social disturbance within its populace caused by such upheavals. They further acknowledge that these are relevant issues to be accounted for when understanding the Pompeian archaeological record itself: the very fact that the city suffered severe and repeated earthquake damage in its last years of existence makes it possible to raise questions about Pompeii that cannot easily be discussed elsewhere. Yet, as most of the subsequent chapters reveal, the seismic background of the Pompeian evidence functions as an extra methodological layer or a perspective from which to approach urban life rather than as a goal in itself.

Art

Art, and especially domestic art, has of course, been at the center of both popular and scholarly perceptions of Pompeii, and Pompeii, which has lent its name to the default classification system of Roman wall paintings, has been right at the center of discourse on Roman art. The decoration and architecture of Pompeian houses has captivated generations of scholars, and few paintings and mosaics have completely escaped notice. While this is not the place to give a complete overview of all that has been written since August Mau cast the foundations of modern understanding of Pompeian domestic art through his famous Geschichte der decorativen Wandmalerei in Pompeji (1882), a very rough sketch serves as a backdrop for the contributions in this volume. For a long period, the field was dominated by descriptive, stylistic and iconographic approaches, with a strong emphasis on chronological development of the decorative media – by and large independently of each other. In the last decades of the twentieth century, this began to change, and scholars sought to discover the social aspects of domestic space and to investigate the role of architecture, wall-paintings and mosaics in social discourse within the urban community. In the German-speaking world, this debate was stirred by Paul Zanker, who, as early as 1979, discussed how the Roman elite villa helped shape Pompeian domestic space, and published a final synthesis of his views in 1995. In the Anglo-Saxon world, a key role was played by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, who wrote a series of essays about how patronage and local elite competition perpetrated the design and the decoration of atrium houses. In America, scholars began to address questions about ‘Roman art in the private sphere’, explicitly acknowledging the relevance of studying art beyond stylistic typology (Gazda 1991, 2). The path laid out by these and other people lay at the basis of subsequent and more detailed studies of domestic architecture and decoration by many scholars, including Dickmann (1999), Hales (2003) and Leach (2004). While more traditional and stylistic analyses continued to be published (e.g., Ehrhardt 1987; Archer 1991; Richardson jr. 2000), they were quickly marginalized in the debate. This shift of emphasis not only involved asking different questions of material already familiar; there also has been a tendency to spend more energy in making sense of categories of art and decoration that had been more or less neglected before, including artefacts (Allison 2004; 2006). In general, there also has been less of a focus on the finest qualities of arts and an increased acknowledgement of the significance of decorations of a more everyday quality (see esp. Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 143–174). Indeed, interest in the art and the culture of art of non-elites has taken the study of art in new directions, exploring new physical and social contexts for its production and consumption – an area in which much valuable work has been done by John Clarke (1998–1999; 2003).

The papers in this section all use the discussion of the last two decades as a starting point and show how many aspects of Pompeian art that have thus far been left unexplored can actually greatly contribute to our understanding of the way Pompeian social discourse shaped taste and domestic décors (Map 1). The first chapter, by Jessica Powers, focuses on wall ornaments, an unusual and understudied category of decorations. Powers makes clear that the intentional practice of inserting valuable objects into the wall plaster as part of a decorative scheme was much more significant than has usually been assumed. Immured objects include obsidian mirrors, luxury glass, intarsia panels, painted marble, sculptural pieces and the like. In line with recent developments, Powers’ approach goes beyond typology as she re-examines the objects within their architectural contexts. Although immured artefacts have been found in only a few homes, those homes cross a spectrum of domestic environments ranging from elite homes, such as the Casa degli Amorini dorati (VI 16, 7.38), to much less imposing dwellings like the Casa dello Specchio (IX 7, 18–19). The fact some house owners at Pompeii were interested to and could acquire wall ornaments is an interesting point in own right, but Powers goes further to explore some the specific motivations that suggest why they chose to employ this specific variety of décor. In the diversity of objects and their contexts she sees an interest in variety. The unexpected nature of wall ornaments creates an opportunity for interesting or even surprising moments for house owners and visitors alike. Moreover, these wall ornaments reveal a taste for the exotic, an eclectic aesthetic planned for and given prominent position within different decorative schemes.

Francesca Tronchin’s essay, a specific case study of the eclectic sculptural collection from a single house, follows as a natural companion to Powers’ city-wide discussion. The Casa di Octavius Quartio (II 2, 2) was one of the many houses to be rebuilt and redecorated following earthquake damage and it is within the context of its redecoration that Tronchin addresses the sculptural collection from this house. While Tronchin is the first to discuss these eclectic works as a collection, her analysis pushes beyond description to engage with the broader theme she identifies as rus in urbe, a theme which ultimately reunites the diverse subject matter of the sculptures with both the painted and architectural setting of the garden. Where previous discussions of these kinds of heterogeneous sculptural collections have dismissed them as unimaginative kitsch, Tronchin finds purpose; it is variety itself that conveys social meaning. In this interpretation, Tronchin adds her voice to those who challenge the direct link between a patron’s social status and the thematic quality of his or her artistic tastes.

Related to the question how such a thematically diverse group of sculptures helped negotiate identities, is the question how they came to serve such a purpose in the Casa di Octavius Quartio. Here again, there is overlap with Powers’ discussion on the origin of wall ornaments, and also with the argument of Michael Anderson (below) who uses the caches of sculptures found stored in several Pompeian houses in his own analysis. On the one hand, it is easy enough to imagine that following the devastation of one or more earthquakes a vast market in damaged and orphaned works of art existed, from which patrons cobbled together a new collection of sculptures. On the other hand, Tronchin argues that such wilful eclecticism is a trend that can also be detected before the earthquake, outside of Pompeii, and even in imperial ensembles. Indeed, eclectic collections will produce an eclectic market, which, in turn, will produce an eclectic collection.

Architectural elements, however, are not so easily interchangeable. To the Romans, the colonnade was an iconic architectural element, so representative of high status life that in painting, the colonnaded façade of a building became shorthand for the luxury villa. There is little doubt that the required structural functions of the column reduced the possibility of eclectic recombinations, but the conventional power of the colonnade’s symbolism was an equally strong force of tradition. Yet, as

Mantha Zarmakoupi demonstrates in her discussion of xystus, porticus and cryptoporticus, there also were innovations in the ways colonnades, and covered walkways more generally, were used in domestic architecture. Combining literary references with the four most famous villae from the area destroyed by the Vesuvius, Zarmakoupi attempts to trace the development and purpose of the cryptoporticus among other walkway forms. Through a discussion of the ways in which ancient authors describe the physical qualities and use of the cryptoporticus, Zarmakoupi uncovers some general principles that subsequently enable her to come to a better understanding of the specifics of these individual villae.

The final chapter of this section by Francesco de Angelis is the most explicitly methodologically interested and offers a dramatic new reading of the some of the most iconic paintings from the House of the Vettii. His reinterpretation suggests that the famous frieze of cupids from the triclinium in house of the Vettii should not be read as a metaphorical narrative of the Vettii brothers’ economic life or (especially) as referring to their libertine status, but rather as part of a broader iconographic discourse prevalent in domestic settings of the time. De Angelis begins by discussing the competing trends in classical art and archaeology to classify and to typologize on the one hand and to interpret the particular histories and even personalities of identifiable individuals on the other. His analysis attempts to employ both of these methods in order to exploit the methodological tension they create, a tension which reveals the strengths and weakness of each method (as well as how they can be combined to bolster each others weaknesses, or to ask new questions), even challenging us to ask if the similarities and differences that our methods highlight are those that might have been revealed to the ancient viewer.

Industry

Places of commerce and trade and evidence for urban production have been identified at Pompeii since the early nineteenth century (Map 2). Bars, bakeries, fulleries, dye shops and the like have marvelled their excavators and have conquered a clear place in the Pompeian canon: few guidebooks have been written without a chapter on shops and workshops (e.g., Mau 1899; Ling 2005, 115–128; Pirson 2007); the mule-driven millstones of the bakeries and the tabernae counters with their large storage jars leave vivid imprints on the memory of many of the thousands of tourists visiting the site each day. Until the last decade or so, however, scholarly attention for these remains has seriously lagged: many of the workshops excavated in the late 19th or early 20th centuries were never thoroughly studied and because typically they did not contain objects or features thought worth protection, such structures were rarely roofed and have suffered disproportionately from the elements. Descriptions from the time of the excavation, when they exist, give little attention to the actual remains of work facilities. Hence, even though the tide has been turning recently, a great deal of important information has already been irrevocably lost.

Unsurprisingly, the amount of relevant 20th century studies of urban production at Pompeii is limited. There is, of course, the work of Amedeo Maiuri (1942), who linked the presence of workshops in many atrium houses to his idea of widespread urban decline in post-earthquake Pompeii. Three students of Wilhelmina Jashemski studied aspects of urban manufacturing emphasizing the structural importance of production in Pompeii’s economy. Walter Moeller (1962; 1976) investigated the evidence for textile production, Betty-Joe Mayeske (1972; 1979) studied the Pompeian bakeries, and Robert Curtis (1979; 1991) discussed the production of fish sauce at Pompeii. Slightly later, Verena Gassner (1986) made a typological study of the Pompeian shops and Bettine Gralfs (1988) studied the evidence for metalworking at Pompeii. A thorough discussion about the urban economy of Pompeii was produced by Willem Jongman (1988), who, contrary to the Jashemski school, argued that the Pompeian economy was rather locally oriented and did not produce for external markets. In the early 1990s, more general, but influential accounts were written by Andrew Wallace Hadrill (1994) and Ray Laurence (1994; 2007) who focused on aspects of the social and spatial position of production at Pompeii.

The decade following the turn of the millennium has seen a clear reappraisal of the material evidence for work and industry. A key project is that of the French Centre Jean Bérard at Naples, which focuses on several kinds of craft activities, including perfumemaking, dye shops, wool-production, and tanning (Borgard, Brun and Leguilloux 2003; Borgard and Puybaret 2003). Nicolas Monteix (2005; 2006), has studied the workshops of Herculaneum and has recently started a project focusing on Pompeian bakeries (2009). Miko Flohr (2008a; 2008b) has conducted exhaustive investigations of the fulleries throughout the city and has discussed the spatial context of urban production (2007). Similarly, Henrik Mouritsen addressed the role of freedmen in production and trade at Pompeii (2001), while Damian Robinson (2005) investigated the role of the elite in urban manufacturing, refining the ideas of Wallace Hadrill (1994). Further important work on Pompeian bars has been done by Steven Ellis (2004a; 2004b), who also is the co-director of a fieldwork project focusing on insula VII 7 near the Porta Stabia, which was almost completely devoted to commerce and production (Ellis and Devore 2006; 2007; 2008; 2009). Most recently, Peña and McCallum have published on pottery production (Peña and McCallum 2009a; 2009b).

All this attention for such everyday issues is certainly unprecedented and it is quickly changing the ways in which manufacturing and trade at Pompeii are conceived. The three chapters in the section on industry in this volume are best seen in the light of these developments as each focuses on questions that have hitherto been under-studied and integrate new categories of evidence. This is certainly true for the chapter written by Michael Anderson, whose focus is on the construction industry and the rebuilding of houses, a topic especially relevant in the seismically troubled last decades before the eruption. Anderson discusses the position of construction activities in a domestic context and the degree to which they were reconciled with regular domestic life. Methodologically, his argument stems from two important developments from the 1990s, combining a micro-scale spatial syntax modelling based on the work of Hillier and Hanson (1984), an improvement on the approach of Mark Grahame (2000), with the systematic consideration of domestic artefact assemblages developed by Penelope Allison (2004; 2006). The fusion of these approaches, made feasible through the use of Geographical Information Systems technologies, proves rather successful and enables the author to go significantly beyond the anecdotal in making sense of those locations where evidence for building materials has been found, especially in relation to the evidence for domestic storage. Anderson evokes a vivid and credible picture of adaptation to earthquake-related disruptions and how the competing spatial aspects of residential priorities – reconstruction and inhabitation – were reconciled. Moreover, his analysis brings new evidence from the private sphere (complementing the evidence from public architecture; Dobbins 1994, 2007; Poehler, this volume) to bear on the question of how much Pompeii had recovered from earthquake damage, before the AD 79 eruption.

The second chapter, written by Miko Flohr, connects seamlessly with Anderson. Like Anderson, Flohr focuses on the spatial tension between competing priorities in domestic space and discusses the impact of workshops constructed in private houses, taking the three large fulling workshops of Pompeii as his sample. In doing so, he embraces qualitative approaches and focuses on the microscale, adapting his methodology to the specific nature of the remains of three fullonicae, each excavated in different periods and preserved under different conditions. In studying the evidence, he combines, where possible, study of artefact assemblages, also inspired by the work of Allison, with an analysis of building materials and techniques, as used by Ling (1997) in his first volume on the insula of the Menander and in the volumes Häuser in Pompeji series (e.g., Seiler 1992). The key question for Flohr is to what degree the construction of a workshop changes the way in which a house is used and how living and working could be combined under one roof. In his contribution, Flohr illustrates some of these ways that industry could be integrated in domestic life.

The last chapter in this section, by Myles McCallum, provides a new view on a category of manufacturing that has kept archaeologists busy for decades on many sites from the ancient world, but hitherto has been almost completely overlooked at Pompeii: the production of pottery. After presenting a basic overview of the material, epigraphic and iconographical evidence for the production and consumption of local and regional pottery at Pompeii, McCallum discusses some basic, but important questions which enable him to link the evidence for pottery production at Pompeii to ongoing debates about urban manufacturing and the people involved in it. His thorough analysis of the location of the two identifiable potteries of Pompeii addresses important aspects of the organization of urban space and connects well with the discussion raised by the work of Laurence (1994). McCallum also discusses the social status of potters, which links his work with that of Mouritsen (2001) and Robinson (2005). Most interesting is the way McCallum uses iconographic evidence to discuss the actual production process and the situation on the shop floor. Indeed, this chapter makes clear how much Pompeii has to offer even in discussing production processes for which there is considerably more evidence elsewhere in Roman Italy.

Infrastructure

Infrastructures, rather than being the parts of practical systems, are the functioning, interconnected, and interdependent systems themselves. An order of magnitude larger than their components, understanding these systems requires the consideration of both their complete physical architectures and the administrative structures that permitted their operation. The investigation of infrastructures must not only bring all these components together, but also give attention to the specific functioning of those systems, including the directionality of their operation. For example, because water systems only flow in one direction, what happens upstream impacts the reality downstream. The study of parts alone creates an imaginary equality across the system that bars us from a more realistic and more interesting image of the ancient city. By this definition, the study of infrastructures is a methodological departure for Pompeianists, even if the study of their parts has long been of interest. The most prominent of these parts are, of course, the water supply system and the network of urban streets, which also serves as drainage for the city (Map 3).

The water supply system of Pompeii is, as a whole, far less well understood than one might expect (Jansen 2001, 27). In part, this is because modern scholarship has largely tended to compartmentalize the subject by focusing separately on the sources of water, the architecture of distribution and consumption, and the means of discharge, categories that themselves are further subdivided. Thus, water sources have been studied under the rubric of wells (Maiuri 1931), the collection of rainwater, and the aqueduct (Ohlig 2001; De Feo and Napoli 2007), while individual works concerning distribution are found on the castellum divisorum (Hodge 1996; Ohlig 1996; Adam and Varene 2008), water towers (Larsen 1982; Heres 1992; Wiggers 1996; Dessales 2006), piping (Nappo 1996; Jansen 2001; Dessales 2007), and fountains (Nishida 1991). Public baths (Eschebach 1979; 1982; Koloski-Ostrow 1990; Manderscheid 1993; De Haan and Wallat 2008), private baths (De Haan 1996; 2001; 2009) and the hygienic effects of water, including toilets (Koloski-Ostrow 1996; Jansen 1997; Hobson 2009) are considered on their own and with little connection to the necessary systems to carry the waste water. Furthermore, drainage is itself often treated in a piecemeal fashion, discussing surface drainage (Koga 1992; Jansen 2000) or sewerage (NSc 1900, 587–599; Eschebach 1987) without clearly articulating how these systems worked together (or did not). Without an understanding of these systems holistically, we cannot begin to ask more nuanced questions about life in the ancient city. Were there qualitative differences in piped water at different parts of the system? Did the differing levels of waste water flowing in streets affect the social texture of neighborhoods? The publications of Wiggers (1996) and Jansen (2000, 2002) are bright spots in the study of water systems, showing a shift in analysis towards an infrastructure of water.