What can I say.
Millions of tourists have walked the streets of the dead city, taking millions of snapshots of themselves standing in abandoned rooms filled with ghosts. Over the last 400 years, collectors 
have looted the site of marble and bronze statues, mosaics, frescos, silver cups, painted clay kraters, alabaster bowls, children’s toys, muffin pans, and burnt bodies twisting in a violent wind.
And yet, there is a value to walking down the stone streets and seeing the ruts worn by countless carts. There is value to knowing how the light falls into rooms and seeing the brightly painted walls of dreams, myths, nature, everyday realities, and the faces of the owners. There is a spatial, tactile understanding that no book can duplicate. Just being there is incredibly important, even though (or particularly because) it is a common experience, shared by millions.
Anything I add will be banal and redundant at best.
Then again if I held to this conclusion I would never write another sentence about anything. And you know that isn’t going to happen.
First, let me give you a tip. All the good stuff from Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, Oplontis, and the other Vesuvian towns was looted by collectors and “archaeologists” in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their focus was on collecting “beauty” and collect they did. Much of this vast collection can be seen at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. We spent the day there and did not see, much less understand, the entire collection.
While the Visitors Center at Pompeii can fill in some of the gaps, you cannot really understand Pompeii or the critical role these discoveries had on Western culture until you visit the Archaeological Museum in Naples. The Romans viewed themselves as the inheritors of Greek art, philosophy, religion and science, so they faithfully copied Greek paintings, sculpture, books, plays and ceramics. For example, much of what we know of Greek painting comes directly from Pompeii, Herculaneum and the other Vesusian towns since the Greek originals were lost and only Roman copies exist today. Excavating Pompeii is also excavating Greece.
Yet our knowledge is far from complete. Fortunately, Archaeology has changed, thank Zeus. We are no longer focused just on shiny objects. We have come to realize that there are many, many things that we can still learn from the sites, things that we do not yet have the technology to discover. As such ruins are no longer completely excavated, as archaeologists are saving a good percentage of sites for exploration in the future when we have better tools.
This strategy is already starting to pay off. In 1752 workmen found 1,800 papyrus scrolls in what is now called the Villa of Papyri at Herculaneum. These books were carbonized by the intense heat of the eruption. Some were in good enough shape to allow them to be unrolled and read, revealing the lost works Latin and Greek philosophers, as well as poems and histories. Unfortunately, many of these papyrus manuscripts were destroyed in the attempt to unroll them, and many more were too burnt to be deciphered.
In 2015, however, a new x-ray technique was developed the by Italian National Research Council that allowed researchers to read rolled scrolls without unrolling or damaging them. This approach holds out great hope not only for the existing unrolled scrolls but for the scrolls in a second, unexcavated library in the Villa of Papyri.
What new plays from Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles are waiting to be read? What new works by Aristotle, Plato and Socrates might be discovered, or mathematics and practical inventions from Archimedes?
History is not dead, only waiting to jump out and surprise us.
