When reading Julia Gaffield’s article “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence: Digging for Lost Documents in the Archives of the Atlantic World”, I was fascinated by the fact that Haiti’s most important historical document had been lost in the archives of another country’s museum for almost the entirety of it’s existence. Gaffield was able to succeed in the hunt for the Declaration while so many others had failed before her because she took a different perspective on the time period of Haiti in the early 1800s. She understood that Haiti was a part of an interconnected web of trans-Atlantic trade which included the exchange of goods, ideas, and people. Therefore, confining the search to Haiti alone would never have allowed the full story to be uncovered. This phenomenon brought my summer trip to Italy to mind. When I visited the ruins of Pompeii, I was surprised to learn about how most of the artifacts had been excavated then shipped off to museums away from the site, or had disappeared altogether. While the most known artifacts still reside close by in Naples, I wondered what else was out there in the world from Pompeii that any tourist in Italy would not get the chance to see. After looking through the Archaeological Superintendence of Pompeii’s online timeline of the history of the excavation (http://www.pompeiisites.org/Sezione.jsp?titolo=History+of+the+excavation+of+Pompeii&idSezione=1003), I realized there was an unimaginable amount of Pompeiian treasures that had been lost to time as excavators had taken undocumented artifacts away from the site since its discovery in 1748. Since then, the southern region of Italy has been occupied by two foreign powers, France and Spain, each of which instituted their own excavation teams and practices at Pompeii. According to the site, during the French occupation, a task force of 1500 men (both civil and military) worked at a fast pace to unearth many of the ruins, but paid little regard to preserving what they unearthed. In 1811, the French marshal and crowned King of Naples Joachim Murat instituted new excavation regulations to reduce the amount of artifacts removed from the site, showing that items were being taken away from Pompeii by the workers. His wife, Caroline Bonaparte (Napoleon’s youngest sister) spread the news of the findings of Pompeii all throughout Europe in written letters. Our society today treats the idea of a global network as novel and that our world is experiencing a newfound exchange of goods, cultures, and ideas. While the emergence of the Digital Age has definitely expedited this exchange, the act of sharing in an international network is nothing new. If Haiti’s Declaration of Independence traveled through this network to England in the early 1800s, many priceless artifacts of Pompeii must have made their way to Spain, France, and other parts of the world in the hands of the workers or as a result of the interconnected monarchies of this time period. Luckily for us, the technologies of the Digital Age open doors to missing connections and create the possibility of discovering things that were once thought to be lost in time. Perhaps these tools can one day be used to find some of the missing treasures of Pompeii.