In AD 79, the final event for many of the inhabitants of Pompeii in Italy was the volcanic eruption that buried them under a 20-foot layer of ash and sediment. Dozens of the corpses retained their shapes long enough for the layers of debris to build around them, forming impressions that, with the decaying of soft tissue, became perfect hollow molds.
Starting in 1863, archaeologists filled the cavities with plaster to create replicas of the victims’ death throes. Narratives were spun around the more evocative casts: a group consisting of a child and two adults, one of whom wore wrist jewellery and whose lap held a youngster, became known as the Family of the House of the Golden Bracelet, while a pair of bodies locked in what appeared to be an embrace were famously named the Two Maidens.
Now, genomic testing on skeletal remains embedded in the casts has challenged both interpretations. As reported in Current Biology, the DNA evidence shows that the identities of the deceased do not match the long-standing assumptions.
The study team, which included David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, US, and David Caramelli, an anthropologist at the University of Florence in Italy, proposed that the adult and the younger child, traditionally viewed as mother and offspring, are genetically an adult male and a boy who were biologically unrelated. Contrary to the established account, the researchers concluded that none of the four people in the grouping was kinfolk.
Alissa Mittnik, a geneticist at the Harvard lab that generated the data, said, “It could have been that these were servants or slaves, or the children might have been the children of servants or slaves who also inhabited the house.”
Genomic sequencing also showed that at least one of the so-called maidens was in fact a man. “And they were not maternally related to each other,” Mittnik said.
Gabriele Scorrano, a University of Copenhagen, Denmark, geneticist who was not involved in the study, said the findings confirmed and reinforced most of a preliminary analysis of the casts announced in 2017 as part of the Great Pompeii Project, an eight-year programme to repair the most endangered features of the site.
In that initiative, medical imaging debunked several myths about the casts. A CT scan of one known as the Pregnant Woman revealed that the person was not pregnant, and might not have been a woman. An array of specialists speculated that bunched-up clothing accounted for the bulge of the belly. They also determined that some of the victims had most likely died from head injuries rather than asphyxiation.
An estimated 10 per cent of Pompeii’s 20,000 or so inhabitants perished when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The first systematic excavations began only in 1748 and proceeded slowly until 1860, when archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli was put in charge. It was Fiorelli who pioneered the technique for fashioning plaster casts. To date, 104 have been made.
Fourteen were examined in the new research. For Mittnik, one of the most surprising revelations about Pompeii’s residents was their genetic diversity. She attributed that to migration, slavery, conquest and commerce. At the time of the disaster, the empire’s trade routes extended from North Africa to Asia, and people moved to Rome by choice and by force.
“Some showed a more eastern Mediterranean-like genetic ancestry, which could match populations, for example, from the Aegean or from the Levant,” Mittnik said. “So, they might be either recent migrants or the descendants of migrants from those regions.”
NYTNS