Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons

Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons (Ph.D.,  University of Texas at Austin) is Assistant Professor of  Classics at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. Her research focuses on ancient Roman graffiti. She served as the Field Director of the Herculaneum Graffiti Project.

Your dissertation was on graffiti in ancient Pompeii. Some would say graffiti is not art, but I'm guessing you'd disagree. So my question is: is all graffiti art? and does it depend on whether we mean graffiti in the ancient world or graffiti today? 

This is a fascinating question and I want to point you to a picture I took right outside the campus of UT Austin where I did my Ph.D.: 

The line between graffiti and art is very blurry. Many people do not consider tags on subway cars to be art, yet the graffiti of the artist Banksy are worth many millions of dollars. In my opinion, all graffiti have the potential to be art -- it is in the eye of the beholder. As my research is interested in the aesthetics of graffiti (their form, handwriting, medium, style, color, effect on the viewer) I consider each piece of writing as art. What does the way the author wrote the message tell us about what they were intending to convey? What is the effect of the way the message is written on me as a viewer? 

What is the most significant discovery about Pompeii and Herculaneum that we ahve made with the new technologies that have become available over the last twenty years?

One of the biggest advances in the last twenty years is the use of archaeological science to tell us more about the past. For example, researchers in Herculaneum have analyzed the sewers to understand more about ancient diets and trade. Other scientists have used computers to virtually scan and un-wrap carbonized scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. Conservation techniques have also improved our ability to preserve these ancient sites for the next generations.

Before I saw the Ancient Graffiti Project website, when I thought of Roman graffiti, I thought of the famous scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian. Is most ancient Roman graffiti grammatically correct, or do you find lots of mistakes?

There are frequently mistakes in the graffiti: grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes, and scratching out words. Other graffiti have what we call "substandard Latin" (sometimes also called vulgar Latin). These graffiti have spelling or grammar that are different than Classical Latin and show us the ways everyday people were speaking and using the language. For example, many Latin graffiti in Pompeii are missing the -m at the end of words, likely because it was not being pronounced. Graffiti provide testimony of bilingualism and regional variation as well.