Book excerpt: Studies of Pompeian material culture have traditionally been dominated by art-historical approaches, but recently there has been a renewed and burgeoning interest in Pompeian houses for studies of Roman domestic behavior. This book is concerned with contextualized Pompeian household artifacts and their role in deepening our understanding of household behavior at Pompeii. It consists of a study of the contents of thirty so-called atrium houses in Pompeii to investigate the spatial distribution of household activities, both within each architectural room type and across the house. It also uses this material to investigate the state of occupancy of these houses at the time of the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD 79. It thus examines artifact assemblages within their spatial and decorative contexts for a more material cultural approach to these remains and for the information which they provide on living conditions in Pompeii during the last decades. In this it takes a critical perspective the textual nomenclature which is traditionally applied to Pompeian room types.