In 1750 a young Swiss engineer named Karl Weber was introduced to the king’s excavation team. He is credited with beginning the first documentation of the sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum. He drew up plans of buildings, maps of streets, and recorded frescoes and objects discovered. This earned him ridicule from Alcubierre who thought that Weber’s obsession was time consuming, irrelevant, and a hindrance to their true mission: the discovery of treasure for the king.
Karl Weber was assigned an assistant, Roque Joachim de Alcubierre. Alcubierre believed Weber was his assistant. (Alcubierre was assigned to Pompeii in 1734. Weber was assigned in the 1750s.)
Before Weber came to Pompeii, Alcubierre's men uncovered Pompeii's largest structure, the Amphitheatre. It was of little interest to the treasure-hunter, and its discovery was ignored. Later, when Weber went through and removed some objects of historical potential, Alcubierre destroyed them.
Alcubierre was destructive. He believed that the assignment from King Charles III was a mission of acquisition of treasure, not a study of history. He regularly criticized and ridiculed Weber for his care and record keeping.
Alcubierre would regularly destroy objects, and even buildings, just to frustrate Weber and to prevent him from "wasting time" recording them. Sometimes, when he had been drinking, or was himself frustrated by work, Alcubierre would destroy Weber's record books by ripping or defacing them. Weber would then have to spend time re-creating the notes.
Substantial finds in 1755 and 1763 allowed the excavation to continue. King Charles III invited foreign dignitaries and visitors to show off his collection. He even allowed them to view the excavation sites. The international attention exposed the methods of the work to public scrutiny. Thus began heavy criticism of what many considered to be reckless destruction of artifacts. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a German classicist, began the public destruction of Alcubierre with an open letter to Count Erico di Bruhl declaring, “This man, who has absolutely no experience working with antiques, is to blame for the many disasters and the loss of many beautiful things.”
Weber believes that Alcubierre had this opinion not only because he was a violent man by nature, but also because the curator in Portici, Camillo Paderni, would inspect the findings of the team. He would select the finest objects for the King's collections, and since there was no repository for more common objects, would destroy the rest with a hammer and discard them.
Weber writes in his journal that the most interesting object that his assistant destroyed was a Roman gladius that was so perfectly preserved by the volcanic ash in the Amphitheatre that it showed no signs of tarnish. He believes it was a new sword, never before used before the destruction. It could have been a prime example of Roman craftsmanship.
Alcubierre often caused destruction simply to prevent Weber from recording things.
During the 1750’s the curator of the king’s museum in Portici, Camillo Paderni, would go over the objects discovered, perform light documentation for tax purposes, and then select the finest objects for the king’s collection. The other objects were destroyed by hammer and discarded.
It was also in 1763 that the city under the Civitas was positively identified when the following inscription was found: “respublica Pompeianorium” which translates to “the commonwealth of the Pompeian’s.”