[Chapter four from J.-P. Descoeudres, Pompeii Revisited: The Life and Death of a Roman Town (Sydney: Meditarch, 1994).]

THE PEOPLE OF POMPEII

An Interview with Estelle Lazer

What kinds of evidence do we have on the people of Pompeii?

There are two forms of physical evidence.  One is the actual bones of people who died.  The other is the plaster or resin casts of victims (see Fig. 28).  These have been obtained by filling cavities left by the decomposed bodies of the victims in the fine ash deposits.

There is a much greater quantity of skeletons than casts, despite the fact that many skeletons have been destroyed or removed from the site for various reasons.  Early explorers and treasure hunters plundered the site, destroying human remains in the process.  For instance, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Last Days of Pompeii (published in 1834), was known to have kept the skull of a Pompeian on his desk because he felt it had belonged to someone of great intellect and with the capacity for evil.  This skull was the inspiration for the character of Arbaces, the villain of the book.

During the early excavations, the skeletons of victims were removed from the locations where they war found and stored in ancient bath houses, where they became disarticulated and the bones intermingled.  These bones can now only be studied individually.  It would be extremely difficult to establish the exact number of individuals that the stored bones represent, though the figure would probably not exceed five hundred. 

It is typical that we do not know the fate of human remains found in the House of the Painted Capitals.  It is known from excavation reports that four skeletons were discovered in the house, but there are no clues as to the current location of these bones.  They may have been destroyed, deposited in one of the bath houses with all the other bones, or perhaps even taken to a museum in Naples.

The available casts have great potential as a research resource which has not yet been exploited.  Unlike the bones, the casts contain evidence of the whole person.  In addition, they may display details of dress and facial expression.  The actual bones still exist within the casts.  If the casts could be X-rayed, entire skeletons could be studied, which would provide much more information than the analysis of individual bones.  This important works still remains to be done.

What exactly are human skeletal studies?

They involve the study of human skeletal remains to extract all possible information about individuals or the populations they represent.  Maximum information can be obtained if complete skeletons are available.  If, as in Pompeii, there are only disarticulated bones, information about the population as a whole can be derived from statistical studies of various types of bones.  The Pompeian skeletal evidence is particularly valuable because the bones are from people who all died at the same time and of the same cause.

What we generally look for in skeletal studies is evidence of the sex, age-at-death, height, population affinities, and evidence of disease or injury.

The Pompeian study is based on a sample of about 300 victims of the eruption.  It is difficult to reassemble the skeletons of individuals unless the bones display distinctive features, such as disease.  As a result of this, I concentrated on those bones that were likely to yield the most information, namely the skull, including the teeth, the ‘long bones’, i.e., arm and leg bones, and the pelvis.  About 300 skulls and smaller numbers of other bones were examined.

Who did not escape the eruption?

Certain scholars have claimed that women, children, the elderly and the infirm were the main victims of the AD 79 eruption.  This hypothesis had never been tested against the skeletal evidence.  The results of my study demonstrate that this assertion is largely without foundation.

There appear to have been roughly equal numbers of males and females in the sample of victims.  It is extremely difficult to estimate the number of children who perished at Pompeii.  Very few skeletons of young children have been preserved partly because the bones of young children can easily be missed in the excavation process.  Most of our evidence of small children comes from casts rather than skeletons.

There is no clear evidence of people having become victims as a result of medical problems.

About 10 percent of the skulls examined displayed evidence of a hormone-related syndrome evidence of a hormone-related syndrome known as hyperostosis frontalis interna (HFI).  This condition occurs with comparable frequency in mostly post-menopausal women in modern populations, which suggests that there was no skewing of the sample towards older people.  The symptoms of this disorder include benign tumour-like growths on the inside of the skull, obesity, headaches and the development of a more masculine appearance, including the growth of facial hair on the upper lip and chin.  It is unlikely that HFI would have influenced the ability of individuals to escape.  In his letters to Tacitus describing the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius (Epistles IV 16, 20), Pliny the Younger mentions that both his uncle and his mother were rather corpulent.  Pliny’s description of his relatives suggests that obesity was not unusual at the time.  His mother begged him to leave her behind because she thought she would slow him down.  In the end, however, she did accompany her son and they both survived.  Although obesity and old age would certainly not have advantaged individuals in the their attempt to flee, there is no compelling evidence that older, overweight people were less likely to escape than other members of the population.

The Pompeian cases of HFI are the earliest and most numerous so far described in the archaeological record.  The important factor of this syndrome is that it is generally associated with older women.  The fact that it was observed in the same frequency as would be expected in a modern population suggests that the Pompeians had a life span comparable to ours, though the incidence of infant mortality was undoubtedly higher.

It is not reasonable to attempt to interpret the status of the victims from the skeletal evidence.  It is not possible to identify slaves or whether people were rich or poor from the bones.  For example, it cannot be assumed that an individual with bad teeth was poor.  This may be an indicator of status in modern Western society but it cannot necessarily be applied to ancient populations.  The Roman writer Suetonius (Augustus LXXIX), for example, reveals that even the emperor Augustus had very bad teeth!

The evidence obtained from the Pompeian skeletal material indicated that the victims reflected a broadly representative sample of a normal population.

What other medical problems did your study reveal?

There is evidence of healed fractures.  One person, whose skeleton could be partly rearticulated, had a fractured shin bone which had healed in the wrong position and as a result was approximately 5 cm shorter than that of the other leg.  It is notable that no signs of compensation for what would have been a most unusual gait were observed in the other bones of this individual.  It is possible that this person routinely used a walking aid like a crutch, or a built-up shoe.

The skull of another individual had a large healed fracture in the temple region.  The extent of the wound indicated that this person would have suffered some degree of brain damage, probably to the area which controls speech.

One of the skulls with HFI showed signs of surgery.  A section of the skull had been removed with a surgical instrument, and the resultant hole had almost completely healed at the time of death.  It is possible that this operation was performed to alleviate headaches which may have occurred as a result of this disorder.

How tall were the people of Pompeii?

Size estimates were based on measurements of the long bones.  They indicate that there was not much difference in size between the ancient Pompeians and the population of Naples in the recent past.  The average height of Pompeian women was approximately 1.54 metres and the average height of the men was about 1.64 metres.  The average heights that were calculated for the victims from the nearby town of Herculaneum were slightly greater.

Height can be used as an indicator of general health and nutritional status.  Different populations have different height potentials.  These are genetically determined.  The height that is actually achieved is the result of the general health and nutrition of an individual during the years of bone growth.  It appears that the Pompeians in this sample were adequately nourished and completely healthy in their childhood years.

What was the dental health of the Pompeians?

No evidence of dental treatment was observed, though it is possible that some teeth that had been lost prior to death had been extracted.  Caries cavities were observed in a number of teeth.  Gum disease was apparent in many mouths and this may have been a contributing factor in ante mortem tooth loss.  In addition, many teeth had thick deposits of calcified plaque.  It is likely that a number of Pompeians had very bad breath!

The teeth were generally worn down flat as a result of eating bread which contained fragments of the grindstones used to mill flour.  In some cases the teeth were worn down to the roots, which could have resulted in painful infections.

Can we tell how the people died in the eruption?

The eruption of Mt. Saint Helens, Washington, in May 1980, appears to have been similar to that of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79.  Autopsies of the victims who died in the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens may provide clues as to how the Pompeian victims met their fate.

The majority of the deaths were due to asphyxiation (suffocation).  The upper respiratory tracts of most of the victims were found to have been blocked by a plug of mucus and ash.  Others died of thermal shock, i.e., they were baked by intense heat.  The stratigraphic context of the Pompeian skeletons is consistent with this interpretation of the main causes of death.  The victims would have died very quickly, probably within about two minutes.