Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae examines the early history of the excavations at three important sites of classical antiquity that first came to light in 1738, through the life and work of Karl Jakob Weber, a Swiss military engineer who supervised these investigations from 1750 to 1764.

While many of his contemporaries sought only the recovery of precious antiquities to the exclusion of the architectural remains, Weber sought to retrieve evidence of the ancient urban fabric and to relate his discoveries to their archaeological context, thereby establishing the first systematic approach for these excavations.

He also proposed a revolutionary manner of publishing his findings, in which all of the works of art from an individual site would appear together with detailed plans, drawings, and commentary drawn from classical and modern sources.