BURIED IN PLAIN SIGHT

Pompeii has been excavated, studied, and written about for nearly three hundred years. And yet, since 2020, the city has been giving up secrets that have changed everything historians thought they understood about how ordinary Romans lived.

In Buried in Plain Sight, author Girmay Hamid takes readers inside the most significant archaeological programme of the twenty-first century: the ongoing excavations of Pompeii's Regio V and surrounding sectors, where teams of scientists, archaeologists, and conservators are recovering an ancient city in breathtaking detail. From a fast food counter with its last meal still in the pots, to the quarters of enslaved workers whose names history never recorded, to a banquet room covered in life-size paintings of divine dancers frozen mid-step, the new Pompeii is not the Pompeii of tourist postcards.

It is messier, more diverse, more violent, and more human than the cleaned-up version we have been sold.

This book is for readers who have always been drawn to Pompeii but want more than the eruption story. It is for anyone who has ever wondered what it felt like to live in a Roman city - not as a senator, not as an emperor, but as a baker, a street vendor, an enslaved worker, or a woman who owned her own property and put her name on the wall. It is for readers who understand that the most important thing archaeology can do is not uncover beautiful objects, but recover forgotten lives.

Buried in Plain Sight is narrative history at its most urgent: the story of a city that has been dead for two thousand years and has never been more alive.