It's in North America and a fair bit more recent, but the Ozette Indian Village site is very similar to Pompeii in a few ways. A population center stuck in time by a large natural disaster, that has been more recently dug up and studied.

Ozette Village was located near Lake Ozette on the northwestern coast of what is now Washington state. About 300-400 years ago a portion of the village was destroyed by a mudslide. This was first attested to in Makah oral tradition which holds that a "great slide" buried the village "long ago".

In February 1970 a storm caused some slumping near the location of the village, exposing extremely well preserved items, including wooden items, which normally rot very fast in the damp climate of coastal Washington State. Over the next 11 years the site was carefully excavated through the joint efforts of the University of Washington and the Makah Tribe. Radiocarbon dating has placed the slide to be sometime in the late 16th or early 17th centuries. This preserved a fairly good look at what life in the village would have been like at the time. Though it should be noted that most archelogists don't treat it as completely identical to Pompeii dues to the rushing sliding mud sending most things asunder.

Among the over 55,000 artifacts (about 30,000 of which were wood) there were multiple longhouses, canoes, toys, implements for fishing, hunting, and whaling, and much more.

One especially important thing found in the wreckage were some fishing nets. These were used to successfully show prehistoric/precontact use of nets in fishing by the Makah tribe allowing them to use them for modern fishing in accordance with their treaties.

If you ever find yourself in the absolute northwestern corner of the US a fair number of these items, or faithfully made replicas, are on display at the Makah Cultural and Research Center (after the pandemic, the entire reservation is closed off to visitors until further notice).

Sources:

National Park Service: The Evolution and Diversification of Native Land Use Systems on the Olympic Peninsula By Randall Schalk (Chapter 7 somewhat, chapter 8 especially) https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/olym/schalk/chap8.htm

Makah Cultural and Research Center: https://makahmuseum.com/

Steven Crouthamel, American Indian Studies, Palomar College: https://www2.palomar.edu/users/scrouthamel/ais130/site_2.htm

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-10-21-9410210313-story.html

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On an August evening in the middle 7th century A.D., a family finished eating dinner. They sat in their house and enjoyed the fresh fruits of hard labor - the year's first harvest had just ended. I like to think they were happy in this twilight moment, safe in the walls of their home, hearing the murmur of neighbors nearby, with full bellies and fuller larders for the coming year. Maybe they sat around the empty dinner plates for a bit, tired from harvesting but nevertheless enjoying each other's company. The fire in the hearth was getting low, someone had to wash the dishes, and soon they'd have to roll out the bed mats for the night - but they'd deal with those things later.

But before they could get to those chores, the ground began to shake. Bowls rattled, dust came down from the roof, and cracks spread through the plaster on the walls.

The family ran outside, leaving shaking plates behind. They were met by neighboring friends and families who were also rushing outside. Everyone knew where to look - at the nearby caldera. Maybe they had seen it tremble and smoke once or twice before. Perhaps they still remembered the town's origin story, where the founders had resettled newly ash-fertilized lands a hundred years after a massive eruption in the 4th century A.D.

Steam might have burst from the caldera, or perhaps a pressurized boom tore through the day's last light. It's not clear. But something happened, and the villagers of Joya de Ceren knew what to do: run.

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Ok, that was fun. Now the serious stuff.

It's not in Rome, China, India, or the Middle East. But the village of Joya de Ceren deserves its reputation as the "Pompeii of the Americas." This ancient site in El Salvador was preserved by a thick layer of ash resulting from the nearby San Salvador/Quetzaltepeque volcano. The volcano tends to erupt in unpredictable side vents, and the one which covered Ceren was only around 700 meters from the village. I'm happy to report that the villagers in my little story all escaped the calamity - no human bodies have been found at Ceren. And luckily, the ash which fell on the site had already cooled, so no fires burned through the thatched roofs or destroyed farms. In fact, the ash was cool enough and gentle enough that we can make these truly incredible casts of plants in the village. For some truly mind-blowing images, I recommend checking out this article by one of Ceren's most important archaeologists.

Like Pompeii, the disaster at Joya de Ceren was "an absurd bit of luck" for archaeologists. The site was much smaller than Pompeii, so its preservation has not given Mesoamerican archaeologists as much of an economically wide-ranging view as Pompeii did for Roman historians. However, I don't want you to take that as me saying "Ceren didn't teach us much." In fact, its small, farming-village status makes it an incredibly rare insight into the lives of the normal rural farmers who are often some of the people least represented in archaeological and historical records.

Before continuing, I want to point out that Ceren was probably a Maya site, but this is not 100% certain. Most archaeologists treat it as one, but there are doubts. At the very least, it was a Maya influenced site. Now, let's take a look at Ceren and the lives it shows.

So far, 17 structures have been excavated at Joya de Ceren (it's probable that more will be found given further excavation). These include homes, storehouses, kitchens, and a few public/ritual structures. Some structures at Ceren may have been built to withstand earthquakes, but the characteristics which made them flexibly resistant to tremors weakened their ability to withstand pressurized ash and other volcanic damage. Thus not all of Cerren's buildings have the same perfect preservation as Pompeii. I'll link a few different images to show the variation.

Like most Maya sites, Ceren was organized around a public plaza. There are a few structures that were probably use for rituals, such as a temazcal sweatbath. There are also some suggestions of social stratification even within this small village; among other things, the sweatbath seems to have been associated with an individual home. It very well could have been maintained by this home's family for the community, but whatever the case, there is some evidence of social differentiation. Ceren's incredible preservation has indicated an unexpected degree of sophistication in Mesoamerican architecture. The site features common bajareque wattle-and-daub construction, but also makes use of other materials. I'll quote a summary:

These earthen structures exhibited "a degree of sophistica tion in the use of reinforced and massive adobe unsuspected for domestic architecture in Southern Mesoamerica" (Sheets 1989:116)...resi dents invested much effort in building both their household and civic structures. Construction efforts included cut-and-fill ground-leveling operations and the paving of areas surround ing structures. Major platforms occurred under all but one of the structures, the kitchen. There were terraces, porches, and additions. Structures had one or multiple rooms. Massive col umns appeared in most structures. Solid walls were shared by special-purpose structures and were added as wing walls to one dwelling...Benches, niches, cornices, and elevated shelves were not con fined to particular types of structures. The construction was apparently done to fairly exact specifications, with a great deal of attention paid to symmetry and orientation. (Kievit 1994)

Another summary - one that I find extremely exciting - emphasizes a couple more fascinating features. I'll put some parts in bold for emphasis.

[At Structure 9]... The bajareque dome, comparable with modern ferro-concrete shells is completely unique. Until now no second building of this kind of construc tion is known. Such construction can only survive under these very rare conditions of preservation. The much smaller dome of the firebox follows the principle of a true arch and is also unique. True vaults are generally extremely seldom in pre Columbian architecture...[other examples are] are barrel [or corbelled] vaults, not spherically curved as the firebox dome at Joya de Cerén. It seems that much more sophisticated construction prin ciples were used in Mesoamerican architecture than is known from stone architecture.

Spherical vaults! Wow! And in passing, I'll mention that at least one article suggests that Ceren's endlessly fascinating temazcal sweatbath was deliberately built to create "male-associated acoustic effects" (Sheets and Mahoney, 2021:1).

While it isn't the "snapshot of a city in a single moment" that Pompeii is, due to well, the poisonous cloud of gases immediately killing the inhabitants, the small town of Ostia Antica just south-west of Rome is a similarly excellent site. There are no cadavers as the town was simply steadily abandoned over time and silted over by the Tiber, but extensive digs have unveiled much of the town, though part of the harbour is now submerged and it seems that the outskirts of the town are underneath a major road.

However, it's very much enough for a casual couple of days walk, and is fascinating as one can see how the city evolved over time. The burial grounds are largely intact, along with warehouses, baths, a large plaza for trading, several temples, apartment buildings and more.

It's less intact than Pompeii - buildings are partially collapsed and rooves are missing - but one can get such a feel for the place just by walking at street level through the various buildings. The roads are even so intact that the ruts carved by endless carts travelling its roads are very visible.

You can also see the divide between the wealthy and the masses. The insulae near the gate and warehouse district are fairly compact, but some of the wealthier townhouses near the river are far larger and even have intact mosaics and frescos adorning them. Of particular interest to me as a fan of food history was the immense bakery in the heart of the town, the grindstones for milling the flour are still in place, as are the immense ovens for baking said bread. Between that and the sheer number of bathhouses in the town, one gains a feeling of a bustling town.

Of course, this is another Roman town, so it doesn't answer the question of other cultures. However, I was honestly incredibly surprised by how excellent Ostia Antica was during my visit to Rome, so I feel I should recommend it to anyone interested in Roman history who ends up visiting the city. While other more famous monuments were more impressive or grand, Ostia was the highlight for me as the closest I could get to actually walking the streets during Roman times.

I'd also point you to Dura Europos in what is now Syria on the Euphrates (the name "Dura Europos" is a modern construction, but works for description). It has a fascinating backstory and material history. The settlement changed hands numerous times from its founding as a "Greek" city with a central plan to a Parthian outpost to the Romans back to the Parthians and then back to the Romans. Eventually, the Roman fort/post/village (the most easterly the Romans made it... we have a shield from a soldier born in Britain!) was destroyed in 256-257 during a Sasanian siege and then abandoned until being "rediscovered" in the early 1930s by British-allied soldiers digging a trench.

During the final part of the siege and just before the attack that evidently was the death knell, the Romans barricaded the structures and homes along the western wall by tearing off roofs and filling the rooms with sand and debris to reinforce the wall itself. That ended up helping preserve amazing religious, military, and cultural pieces from that period including parts of the Christian house and baptistery, an important painted Synagogue, a Mithraeum, and numerous personal homes as they were all on "Wall St" as it were.

I was fortunate enough to do my Master's degree at Yale and worked at the Art Gallery there as a curatorial assistant for a few years. The Gallery has an amazing collection of material (close to 100,000 objects ranging from beads up to walls of rooms) from Dura Europos including incredibly early depictions of Jesus and a few of the Disciples on frescoes as well as an amazing baptistery from what would have been a "Christian House" for worship and meetings etc. Yale also houses an intact Mithraeum from Dura and is on display currently. I highly recommend a visit to New Haven if you're into the idea of seeing everything in person.

The Synagogue there was painted with rich murals depicting various biblical scenes (especially the Esther / Mordecai stories, which is fitting given the geographical context). The Torah Shrine was also preserved as it was up against the outer wall. It is now housed in Damascus with a number of other important pieces from Dura Europos.

I was lucky enough to help with the original digitization of the Dura collection in the early '00s and the number of slides and information we have about the original excavations in the '30s is incredible.

More info available here on the excavations from Yale and I have a rather good-sized bibliography on Dura (have been collecting Final Reports and anything I can find that has to do with Roman Syria and Dura for the last 20 or so years) if anyone wants more recommendations!