Resurrecting Pompeii (19 page)

works, like those of Gautier and Bulwer-Lytton. The early period of excavation was marked by the poor storage and subsequent disarticulation of a large proportion of the skeletons. Ironically, these skeletons now present the ultimate vignette of a romantic archaeological site. Contemporary popular culture, as exemplified by films like
Indiana Jones
, would be hard pressed to better the image of the mounds of bones stored in the Sarno Baths.

The lack of documentation of the skeletal sample meant that knowledge of the provenance of skeletons was lost. In addition, the disarticulation of individual skeletons over time resulted in a significant reduction of information. This, in turn, discouraged scholars from working on the bones, even when the archaeological value of the Pompeian skeletons was finally recognized.
⁶
It is worth noting that disarticulation did not pose a major problem for nineteenth century physical anthropologists as they tended to concentrate their efforts on the skull. Even the more recent work of D’Amore
et al
.
⁷
was essentially craniocentric.

Of course, no archaeological data set is complete. They are always constrained by the accident of what survives over time and the fact that the archaeological record is usually biased towards more durable examples of material culture.
⁸
The human skeletal remains from Pompeii differ from material from other sites as most of the loss is the result of post-excavation activities. This has apparently been a greater deterrent to scholars than if the loss had occurred for other reasons. Some scholars have further argued that the value of the Pompeian sample has been superseded by the discovery of so many well-preserved bodies from Herculaneum.
⁹
It is important to emphasize that even though Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by the same event, the two sites are different and the data sets are not interchangeable.

Despite these problems, there is no doubt that the available skeletal material can yield valuable information about the inhabitants of Pompeii who became victims of the eruption, but it requires a pragmatic approach to deal with the constraints of the sample. The parameters for such a study are imposed by the nature and documentation of the excavations over time and the subsequent storage of the skeletal material. In addition, on-site conditions constrain the research design.

As a result, the main problem in developing a research design for this project was how to tease information from the difficult data set. The Pompeian victims provide a large sample of individuals who all died of a known cause within a short period of time. Further, unlike most other sites from antiquity, these bones provide valuable information about a Roman population that is not based on a cemetery.

As mentioned above, the main repository of human skeletons excavated in Pompeii is the
Terme del Sarno
(VII, ii, 17) with a smaller collection housed in the
Terme Femminile del Foro
(VII, v, 2/8/24). While the Sarno Bath collection was completely unsorted, the larger part of the Forum Bath collection had been specifically gathered for examination.
¹⁰
The Forum Bath material was stored by bone type, including femur, tibia, humerus and skull. The sample sizes for each type and side of long bone ranged from 100 to 160. There are 125 crania and about 20 loose mandibles.

Light levels in both these buildings are low. This suggests the truth of Seneca’s statement that his ancestors kept their bath buildings gloomy as they only felt warm in the dark.
¹¹
The Forum Baths received so little natural light that it was necessary to wire the building and install a 100 watt light globe. This was found to be insufficient for making observations and reading measurements. A hand-held bicycle lamp was therefore used to direct light. Though cumbersome, it proved to be an essential tool.

Each building has its own wildlife problems. The main animal life in the
Terme Femminile del Foro
consisted of rats and mice which seemed to derive some sustenance from biological matter, such as paper labels and the remains of seeds that were presumably used in the 1979 skeletal study for the determination of cranial capacity.
¹²
The presence of these rodents influenced the way bones were labelled for this study (see below).

A lesser, but still irritating, problem posed by rodents was consumption of the filling of the ‘bean bag’, which was used to keep skulls stable during measurement. As dried beans were difficult to procure at the local supermarket, I decided to substitute small pasta shells as a filling. This proved most satisfactory until the bag was discovered by a local mouse. Although the bag was wrapped in several plastic bags and locked in a drawer when not in use, the contents kept disappearing. After the consumption of two bags of pasta (and a considerable portion of the cloth bag), I discovered that soaking the pasta in acetone prior to filling provided a mouse-proof solution. This anecdote gives some indication of the impact of vermin on the daily field work routine.

The wildlife in the Sarno Baths posed a greater direct risk to the skeletal material. Some of the bones had been partially destroyed by beetles as evidenced by damage consistent with chewing and the discovery of beetle elytra inside crania. Carpenter bees posed a threat to the plaster casts of humans as they bored holes into the plaster for their nests. As mentioned above, the use of crania by birds as nests meant that the skeletal landmarks were obscured by bird lime. This had to be removed very slowly and with extreme care to avoid damage and loss of information.

A key problem which affected the quantity of data that could be collected was access. The buildings used to house the Pompeian bones also served as a store for other finds from the site, such as marble and bronze artefacts. To maintain security, objects were generally not allowed to be removed from these stores for study or other purposes. Special permission was required to gain access to these buildings and to examine the material housed in them. Because of the value of the stored material, only three custodians had security clearance to handle the keys to these particular deposits. Access to the material was only possible when one of the guards was present. If one of the three custodians were absent, entry was usually only permitted in the morning.

The opening hours of the site vary throughout the year, the longest occurring in the summer months. Unfortunately, this is the period when the guards tend to have their holidays. As a result, for much of each field season, access was limited to four or five hours per day. In addition, I was usually locked in for the duration of each working day. This captivity entailed certain physical discomfort.

Access was also limited by the climate. It was more practical to carry out the bulk of the field work during summer and autumn as winter work conditions were far from ideal. The temperature and light levels inside the ancient buildings drops considerably during winter and the humidity rises. The length of each season varied from five weeks to six months, over a period of five years, the average lasting about three months.
¹³

The literature variously suggested that approximately 2,000 individuals either lost their lives or had already been excavated (see Chapter 4). Such a large sample from a documented destruction is virtually unknown from antiquity.

Fewer individuals were available for study than suggested by the literature. It is known that a considerable number of bones were removed to the
Regia Università di Napoli
in 1853 for study by Chiaie. It is not known whether the hundred skulls that formed the basis of Nicolucci’s examination came from this collection or were additionally removed from the site.
¹⁴
There has been no documented major removal of skeletal material from the site since these early anthropological studies. As many of the bones that are currently stored in Pompeii were probably excavated after the middle of the nineteenth century, it is likely that they would form a representative sample of the victims.

The sample has also been depleted by souvenir hunters and novel forms of secondary usage. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for example, chose to grace the desk of his Knebworth house in Hertfordshire with a skull he collected from the excavations. Its shape and dimensions convinced him that it must have belonged to a man of great intellect and talent, a man like the evil Arbaces of his
Last Days of Pompeii
.
¹⁵
Hester Lynch Piozzi, who published an account of his visit to Pompeii in 1786, observed a French tourist pocketing a human bone as a memento.
¹⁶
In 1776, François de Paule Latapie commented on people who felt the need to have a piece of a Pompeian victim in their private collections and admitted to having removed skeletal material from the site for this purpose.
¹⁷
This is an historical problem that, to some extent, still exists in cases where bones have been left
in situ
. For example, the bones of two skeletons were left as they were found in the
Casa del Fabbro
(I, x, 7)
¹⁸
and were made available for the present study. Over a period of three years the number of bones in this house dwindled markedly. Apparently, tourists have managed to gain entry to the house and have purloined bones, such as mandibles, for souvenirs.

Some time ago, a ‘cottage industry’ was set up in the Sarno baths. This involved the transformation of human femora excavated at Pompeii into hinges for the reconstruction of ancient furniture found on the site. The original hinges were made of turned horse metatarsals which often required replacement for restoration.
¹⁹
This has contributed a novel source of sample bias to the femur collection (see Chapter 6).

value of the material as an archaeological resource. These remains re flect previously unexplored aspects of an important classical site. Unlike other skeletal samples from this era, this represents a mass disaster rather than the more commonly encountered cemetery populations. Cemetery populations often cover large time spans and may be defined or skewed by sex, age, cultural practices, such as segregation, or pathology, as in the case of plague burials.

The Pompeian skeletal remains, along with those found from other sites destroyed by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius, form a sample with a number of features that are not often found in the archaeological record. They reflect a living population, which can yield valuable information about the people who inhabited Pompeii on the eve of its destruction. The major asset of these collections of bones is that they provide a relatively large sample of skeletal material from the ancient world where two variables, time and the cause of death, are already known.