Students undertaking the 2 Unit Ancient History course in the New South Wales Higher School Certificate are required to complete a compulsory study of Pompeii and Herculaneum. When they attempt the relevant section in the final examination they need to answer three questions as follows:
Question 1, which usually consists of several parts, requires the students to extract relevant information from some or all of the historical sources included with the question.
Question 2 requires the students to employ historical sources and apply their own knowledge to reconstruct aspects of life in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Question 3 requires the students to refer to sources and apply their own knowledge to issues of investigating, reconstructing and preserving the past and related ethical issues.
My students are presently researching for a presentation on the life and society of the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum. They are permitted to use technology to faciliate their presentation. Each student has to collect a range of historical sources to augment their presentation. I hope to utilise a wiki or web site to collate all of their material.
I have updated a dedicated web site of links to research, resources and photographs of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Links include the Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei, The Forum at Pompeii, Mazois’ famous sketches of Pompeii, CyArk’s multimedia exploration of Pompeii, the excellent QuicktimeVR panormas created by Francesca Tronchin and Diego Bonilla, an extensive gallery of images at the University of Buffalo and John Hauser’s pictures of Pompeii. I have also added a set of links to relevant galleries on Flickr.