Greeting the Ostiarius: A Preliminary Exploration of Doorkeepers' Rooms in the Houses of Pompeii (Cesca LaPasta, UC Berkeley)
Abstract: Ancient Roman authors regularly discuss the doorkeeper, ostiarius in Latin, typically an enslaved person who was stationed near the front of a house in order to control movement into and out of the house. While archaeologists have often been eager to identify spaces as doorkeepers’ rooms, there have not been any systematic investigations of such spaces in Roman houses. This talk addresses this issue by offering preliminary investigations of potential doorkeepers’ rooms in Pompeian houses. The approach includes mapping such spaces with ArcGIS in order to trace patterns in the urban environment, as well as looking at individual case studies. This forms the basis for one chapter of a larger dissertation project titled, “Living under Lock and Key: Slavery and Security in the houses of Pompeii.”