I'm not sure what you expect to find that would completely transform our understanding of the time period. The most likely discoveries are going to be filling in details about things we already knew. This period of time was already pretty well documented. Even if we found something amazing like some of Aristotle's lost works, we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them. Really the most interesting and useful finds would be more mundane things like household records, and personal diaries.

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seizethecheese 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Disagree. My understanding is that most surviving works have been transcribed repeatedly over the centuries, often times based on preferences of the people living at the time. There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.

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neaden 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's less that the stuff would be considered heterodox, as just not as good/relevant. Like certain texts were used in the Roman world for school, just kind of universally taught to the literate class. The Aeneid was one of these but before it was written the Annales by Ennius was the classic poem everyone had to learn. Then the Annales became less popular, stopped being taught, and now we only have some fragments of it.

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empath75 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.

Heterodoxy (or really, orthodoxy) wasn't really a thing in 79ad, and you're not likely to find much of it in the private library of a wealthy Roman's vacation home. The only forbidden work you're going to see from that era is stuff critical of the emperor.

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seizethecheese 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean heterodox as seen by medieval monks, so deeply unchristian things, for example.

	▲	neaden 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's hard to imagine something more heterodox than Ovid (he managed to get himself exiled by Augustus), and that survived. Medieval readers didn't seem to mind that sort of thing in Greco Roman writing, it was part of their heritage, no one was seriously worshipping those gods so it wasn't seen as a threat. The people in the past behaving in a way that was seen as immoral wasn't a problem.

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CGMthrowaway 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Could change our understanding of history - slavery, early Christianity, politics, secularism among roman elite, etc

Or of technology- steam power, mechanical computation (like the Antikythera mechanism, which is the only known example of such a thing until 1300 years later), mechanized production, mining techniques, etc

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legitster 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We've seen this happen already once with the recovery of palimpsests. Outside of a few lucky discoveries, the vast majority of what monks were discarding were things that were not seen as useful - outdated (to them) legal texts, liturgical books, etc.

The exception though would be Greek literature. Greek literacy collapsed in the early medieval era and a large catalogue was probably just scrapped or discarded before even being collected in Monasteries. Herculaneum could represent a legitimate treasure trove in that regard.

	▲	empath75 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A _lot_ of greek literature survived via the Byzantine Empire and through Arabic translation, though.

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lopsotronic 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Precisely how early Heliocentrism began to be seriously considered is a very much open question, but of its more lucid proponents, very little survives, if anything at all. Usually only in snippets told by others.

And that's just one thing, who knows what else those old Greeks/Phoenicians/etc were kicking about.

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normie3000 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them

So we can just get ChatGPT to fill in the blanks.