In the summer of 2022, Tulane University, in collaboration with archaeologists from other institutions, began excavations at the site of Pompeii. The archaeological work was focused on Insula 14 of Region 1, located in the southeastern sector of the site. To overcome the challenges of recording a complex urban excavation, and of working with a collaborative team, we designed and implemented a unique workflow that combines paperless and 3D data-capture methods through the use of GIS technologies. The final product of our documentation workflow was a robust and easy-to-use online geodatabase where archaeologists can revisit, explore, visualize, and analyze each excavated context using virtual tools. We present our workflow for digitally documenting observational and spatial data in the field, and how we made these data available to project archaeologists during and after the field season. First, we describe the development of digital forms in ESRI's Survey123. Then, we explain our procedures for 3D documentation through SfM photogrammetric methods and discuss how we integrated the data and transformed it into an accessible format by using interactive dashboards and online 3D web scenes. Finally, we discuss the components of our workflow that are broadly applicable and that can easily be adapted to other projects.

The idea that the dead were polluting — that is, that corpses posed a danger of making the living unclean, offensive both to their own communities and to the gods — has long occupied a fundamental position in Roman funerary studies. Nevertheless, what that pollution comprised, as well as how it affected living society, remain subject to debate. This article aims to clarify the issue by re-examining the evidence for Roman attitudes towards the dead. Focusing on the city of Rome itself, I conclude that we have little reason to reconstruct a fear of death pollution prior to Late Antiquity; in fact, the term itself has been detrimental to current understandings. No surviving text from the late republican or early imperial periods indicates that corpses were objects of metaphysical fear, and rather than polluted, mourners are better conceived as obligated, bound by a variable combination of emotions and conventions to behave in certain, if certainly changeable, ways following a death.