Archaeologists led by Pompeii park director Gabriel Zuchtriegel found a wardrobe that nobody opened again after Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, holding 38 bronze coins, a necklace of at least 24 childhood charms and the bones of two young mice.
The Pompeii Archaeological Park announced the find on October 29. The wardrobe stood in a house on Via dell’Abbondanza, one of the busiest streets of the Roman city buried by the volcano.
The house is catalogued as IX 11, 7 and is also known as the House of Cornelius Maximus. It sits in block 11 of Regio IX, one of the nine districts archaeologists use to map Pompeii.
The results were published in the park’s online excavation journal, the E-Journal degli Scavi di Pompei, in a paper signed by Zuchtriegel and six colleagues, according to La Brújula Verde.
-
Astronomer Matthew Holman spotted a possible dwarf planet up to 1,500 km wide beyond Pluto in Vera C. Rubin Observatory data, an object that hid among millions of stars for more than 10 years
-
Mission scientists at ESA saw the 151-metre asteroid Dimorphos as a separate dot for the first time from 1,280 km away, four years after NASA’s DART probe slammed into it at 6.1 km per second
-
PhD student Ricardo Sacamoto named a 5-metre dinosaur weighing up to 2 tonnes that sat in London’s Natural History Museum for more than 25 years after it was dug out of a Surrey brickworks quarry in 2001
-
Inspired by Brazilian termites, researchers develop microrobots capable of sensing their environment, exchanging signals, and acting collaboratively without relying on a central command
A piece of furniture that survived as a mold
The wood of the wardrobe rotted away long ago. But the ash that filled the room hardened around it first, keeping its shape, the same principle behind the famous plaster casts of Pompeii’s victims.
What the team found was a corner cabinet with two wings, each about 2 meters long, pushed into the southeast corner of the room. Its walls were made of overlapping slats, with a base of large planks.
Two iron fittings and two tall iron feet held it to the floor. The ceiling of the room collapsed as the volcanic current arrived, so the cabinet was half buried and more than half its height survived.
What a woman kept on her shelves
Many of the objects point to a woman’s daily routine, the park said. Among them were bronze tweezers, a small slate slab for grinding pigments and a glass perfume bottle.
The slab worked as the Roman version of a makeup palette. There was also an incense burner to perfume the home and a bronze lamp, along with pots and pans in bronze, glass and ceramic.
One small cup, decorated with scales imitating a pine cone, stood out for its quality. Fragments of so-called eggshell ware came from Baetica, the Roman province that covered much of today’s southern Spain.
A necklace from childhood
The most personal find was a necklace of at least 24 tiny charms made of faience, bone, glass paste and rock crystal. Each one was pierced so it could hang from a cord.
The charms show gods such as Bes and Mercury, along with feet, hands, pine cones and bunches of grapes. Objects like these were once taken for magic tools used in spells and potions.
They are actually crepundia, a Latin word meaning “rattles.” Parents hung them on children to protect them and to hear where the child was, thanks to the jingle as they moved.
Adults often kept them for life. In this house, the necklace sat in a cloth bag inside the wardrobe, which the park reads as a keepsake from a childhood of which little else remained.
The Roman world had high geographic mobility, from slaves to rich merchants, so many people lived far from their parents and the places where they grew up, the park explained.
38 coins that nobody came back for
The wardrobe also held a small hoard of 38 bronze coins, kept in a little woven basket called a cistella. The team analyzed the plant remains of the basket during the dig.
For the archaeologists, the coins are a clue. Their presence suggests the owner or owners did not have time to collect anything of value, whether in money or in memories.
On the bottom shelf of the south wing lay a small wooden box with a bronze catch and eight lead weights, six of them with iron handles, which point to some kind of trade.
Someone dug a tunnel and left the loot behind
Not everything was where its owner had left it. At an unknown date, someone dug a tunnel from the west to the back of the room and stirred up the fill, La Brújula Verde reports.
That person set aside the bronze tableware: a jug, a bucket, two cups and a lamp. Everything was stacked as if to be carried out later. It never was.
The park noted that other recent digs at Pompeii have revealed traces of people who went back after the eruption to search for their belongings under the ash.
Two mice in an amphora
The team also found the skeletons of at least two mice inside an amphora on a mezzanine. Lab analysis at the park points to the wood mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus.
The animals were not fully grown, judging from their 117 tiny bone fragments. These mice live in fields and gardens and often sneak into attics and storerooms looking for food.
Rodents have turned up elsewhere around Vesuvius too, including the servants’ quarters of the Civita Giuliana villa and the sewers of Herculaneum, Archaeology Magazine noted.
A comfortable house under renovation
The room with the wardrobe has refined Fourth Style wall paintings, with yellow backgrounds, peacocks, panthers and dolphins, attributed to the painters’ workshop of Via di Castricio.
At the same time, the house was being renovated when the volcano erupted. Ceilings had only bare plaster, and someone had cut a window that broke part of a finished painting.
The facade was first excavated in 1912. The rooms behind it were only now investigated, as part of the restoration of the neighboring Insula of the Chaste Lovers.
The owner remains unknown
The link to Cornelius Maximus relied on inscriptions that can no longer be seen, so the name is only tentative. CBS News reports that about 15% to 20% of Pompeii’s population died in the disaster.
“We cannot reconstruct with certainty the identity of the person who lived in the house, but these fragments bring us closer to their everyday life,” Zuchtriegel said in the park’s statement.
A city that keeps giving up secrets
The find is the latest in a series from Pompeii, after a 2,000-year-old love note and a gladiator scene on a city wall announced in January. Digs elsewhere keep reshaping ancient history, like the 2,800-year-old agora uncovered in Troy.
The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that property of victims without heirs was meant to fund the rebuilding of Pompeii, a plan that never happened. Did the woman who kept those 38 coins and her childhood necklace escape the eruption, or never leave her home?
