Abstract
Willem Jongman's The Economy and Society of Pompeii, published in 1988, was an incentive for field archaeologists to put archaeological data into perspective and, above all, to question the historical conclusions they thought they could draw from it. Archaeology is the only branch of ancient history whose documentation is increasing significantly; we are beginning to reconstitute series of facts that were hitherto lacking to shed light on this or that aspect of ancient civilizations, in particular on the technical and economic evolution of the Greco-Roman world. But this reconstitution of erased parts of our history can only be achieved on the twofold condition that archaeologists interpret and date their excavations correctly, and that they provide sufficiently numerous series of observations to erase the heterogeneity of a documentation that will, by its very nature, always be partial.
The historian therefore seeks to obtain significant samples that can answer the questions we want to ask of our past. In this respect, W. Jongman has forced archaeologists to open their eyes to their own prejudices, challenging long-established traditions that have proved to be erroneous or, to say the least, fragile. But his book, salutary as it was, needs to be placed in the historiographical context of its time. At the time of its publication, several aspects of the book were rightly disputed, and more importantly, recent developments in archaeological research have answered some of the questions raised, but the fact remains that the shock it provoked never ceases to challenge us.
Archaeologists spend a lot of time giving good answers to unimportant questions, to the point where our discipline is drowned in detail and we can no longer see the main lines, or even often the reasons for our research. This academic and institutional heaviness, promoted in particular by the archaeological services who want us to document every detail, no matter how minute, even and especially those we don't understand, ends up being sterilizing. It is salutary that, from time to time, a provocateur, in the strongest sense of the word, comes along to remind us of our excesses and what the real stakes of our research should be. With this in mind, W. Jongman presented the main lines of his book, explained its context and explained how his thinking had evolved over the last thirty years.
