Resurrecting Pompeii (28 page)

It is appropriate to consider palaeodemography and the use of life tables at this point as they have been employed by scholars like Henneberg and Henneberg and Capasso,
⁵²
but eschewed by Bisel
⁵³
and myself, to describe the ancient populations of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Palaeodemography is concerned with the reconstruction of ancient populations from archaeological skeletal material. The value of palaeodemographic studies has been debated for some decades.
⁵⁴
The key problem that had to be addressed was the description of populations using sexing and, more particularly, ageing techniques for skeletal identification, with their attendant problems. Various methods have been developed in an attempt to address the issues associated with demographic reconstructions.
⁵⁵
A series of assumptions were developed and justified to enable palaeodemographic studies to be considered useful. One of the most important, which allowed the construction of life tables from records of mortality, was population stability. A stable population is not affected by immigration or emigration, meaning that they balance each other out or that the population is closed to migration. The sex and age distribution will therefore be a function of the population’s actual fertility and mortality. A stationary population is a stable population where birth and death rates are equal.
⁵⁶

Life tables are used to demonstrate mortality and survivorship. They were initially devised in the seventeenth century by Edmund Halley for the purpose of computing annuities for life insurance. The original models were derived from known populations, which meant that the data were relatively accurate.
⁵⁷
Life tables have been applied to archaeological material to provide overall population profiles. Modern models are used but the level of accuracy of such models decreases when extrapolated onto ancient populations due to the number of assumptions that must be drawn.

Bisel argued that the victims of the
_AD
79 eruption represent a cross-section of a living population and that it would be meaningless to undertake a mortality study at Herculaneum as such studies are only valid for cemetery populations.
⁵⁸
There certainly is a real difference between the make-up of a cemetery population and a sample of victims from a disaster. Survival of such an event would appear to be random and it is difficult to be certain that the victims reflect the actual
_AD
79 population.

The most obvious results of the determination of age-at-death for the Pompeian sample are the high proportion of adults to children and the lack of neonatal and infant bones. The low recovery rate of the bones of neonates and very young juveniles from archaeological sites in general has been documented (Chapter 5). These bones do not tend to survive as well as the more robust bones of adults for various reasons. The Pompeian skeletal remains that were available for this study were not excavated by people with anatomical knowledge. It is quite possible that workers on the site have not recognized the bones of neonatals and infants as those of humans. In addition, the recovery of human remains, with the exception of the casts, was not a high priority in Pompeii until the latter part of the twentieth century. Another major factor that could account for the bias towards the survival of adult rather than juvenile bones in the sample is the method of storage.

The suggestion that this problem is related to recovery and storage rather than a real absence of young juveniles amongst the Pompeian victims is supported by the comparative frequency of juvenile bones in collections of skeletons that have been left
in situ
for display purposes, such as those observed in the
Casa del Menandro
(I, x, 4) and the number of children represented in the cast collection. For example, in 1960–61 the forms of thirteen individuals were cast in what is now known as the Garden of the Fugitives (I, xxi, 2). Six of these were clearly children, the youngest of which have been very roughly aged at about four of five years on the basis of visual inspection. While age estimates based solely on visual inspection can hardly be considered reliable, it is clear that these individuals were very young. Another example is a cast of young child that was found in the
Casa del Bracciale d
’
Oro
in the
Insula Occidentalis
(VI, xvii, 42), Figure 10.1.
⁵⁹

Nicolucci chose to study a sample of 100 skulls for his 1882 work. He considered that the entire range of ages was represented in his sample, with the majority being between the ages of 60 and 90. His age determinations were based on suture closure and examination of the teeth.
⁶⁰
It should be noted that while the criteria he used to establish age-at-death were absolutely reasonable for nineteenth-century scholarship, they would no longer be considered reliable. Nicolucci unfortunately neglected to mention the criteria he used for his dental examination so it is difficult to assess the ages he established. It is probably reasonable to assume that he based his age determinations on attrition and tooth evulsion. It is quite possible that Nicolucci obtained such high ages for his sample as a result of extrapolation from his experience of contemporary Italian tooth wear and loss. Since his main interest was in the determination of ‘racial’ typology, he was not particularly concerned with establishing the actual proportions of age groups in the sample of victims.

The research done by D ’Amore
et al
. in the latter part of the twentieth century had similar aims to that of Nicolucci, which meant that they also did not attempt to use their study to understand age groupings. Instead, they concentrated on a sample of 123 skulls, which were mostly adult, though they did include a few older juveniles to determine their ‘racial’ affiliations. Their determination of age-at-death involved a four-part classifi- cation system based on the work of Vallois: juvenile, covering the ages from about 12 or 13 to 21 years of age; adult, which incorporated individuals ranging in age from 21 to 40 years; mature, covering people from 40 to 59; and senile, which included those of 60 or more years.
⁶¹
They also applied this system to Nicolucci’s series for comparative purposes and tabulated the results.
⁶²
In their sample, 56 per cent of males were classified as mature and 58 per cent of the females as adult as compared to Nicolucci’s classification of the majority of both genders as senile, viz. 71 per cent of males and 41 per cent of the females.
⁶³

D ’Amore
et al
. did not supply details of the actual criteria they used to place each individual into this classification system and one can only conclude that those of Vallois were employed. Juvenile age-at-death was determined by tooth eruption and adult ages were based on cranial suture closure. Vallois considered tooth attrition to be too dependent on general health and diet to be of value for the study of ancient, unknown populations.
⁶⁴

Vallois ’ criteria for ‘juvenile’ age determination, namely from the end of the eruption of the second molar to the almost complete closure of the spheno-occipitalis synchondrosis and the first appearance of vault closures,
⁶⁵
are quite reasonable, with the possible exception of the final criterion. Suture closure of the cranial vault, which was also the single component for Vallois’ ‘adult’, ‘mature’ and ‘senile’ categories, using the skull,
⁶⁶
as mentioned above, has been found to be of questionable value in the determination of age-at-death because of its high variability.

It is remarkable that Vallois ’ method for adult age classification was apparently employed so uncritically, despite the fact that the validity of suture closure as an age indicator had been challenged both by authors like Krogman, whose work D’Amore
et al
. referred to for sex attribution and by the other participants in the conference at which Vallois contributed this paper.
⁶⁷
Indeed, it is notable that after having devoted so much space to a discussion of the problems associated with sex identification, D’Amore
et al
. gave minimal consideration to issues related to the determination of age-atdeath. Their age estimates can be seen in Table 7.8. These results were compared with those obtained by Nicolucci (Table 7.9).

It is notable that D ’Amore
et al
. did not consider the possibility that the consistently older ages identified by Nicolucci may have resulted from a lack of experience with teeth from ancient populations, which were more likely to demonstrate a greater degree of attrition as a result of consuming stone

ground grain. D ’Amore
et al
. concluded that they had made an empirical comparison between the breakdown of age-at-death in their sample and that of Nicolucci. They suggested that the difference between their results and those of Nicolucci could be explained by different samples or perhaps by a different system of classification.
⁶⁸

More recently, the Pompeian skeletal material has been re-examined by Henneberg and Henneberg. They based their estimates of age-at-death on essentially the same sample of material that was used for this publication. They used 364 skulls and 186 right-hip bones. The ageing criteria that were employed were the obliteration of the cranial sutures, the state of dentition and changes to the pubic symphysis and auricular surfaces (Table 7.10).
⁶⁹
The results they obtained were not dissimilar from those obtained by the author.

The key difference between the two works can be seen in the interpretation of the available data, with possible variation resulting from differing expectations. According to the assessment by Henneberg and Henneberg, the majority of the sample comprised young adults, with an estimated age at death of between 20 and 40 years. They observed very few children and relatively few people in the very old age bracket. They explain the lack of young juveniles in the sample, with the same arguments mentioned above about survival and recognition of the bones of young individuals in the archaeological record. They argue that the age distribution of adults in the Pompeian sample does not vary significantly from that observed at ancient South Italian burial grounds, most notably those of Paestum, dating from the sixth to the fourth centuries
_BC
and Patanello, which dates from the sixth to the third centuries
_BC
. They also point out that the age distribution of the Pompeian adults is quite comparable with data from death records of preindustrial Central European populations. This led them to conclude that the age structure of the Pompeian skeletal sample could be considered normal for a living ancient population. They use the lack of variation from ancient

cemetery samples to argue that the Pompeian population was stationary and therefore appropriate to subject to demographic techniques. This can be questioned, as there is evidence to suggest that the population at Pompeii was probably not stationary during the last 17 years of occupation (Chapters 4 and 9).
⁷⁰

The age pro files that have been produced from these two works also need some consideration. The incomplete nature of some of the sample meant that there were a number of adult individuals whose age could not be identified with certainty. These cases were assigned an indeterminate score. It is diffi- cult to assess this difference in result without access to all their raw data but it is possible that the use of the auricular surface by Henneberg and Henneberg provided them with fewer equivocal cases, though it is unlikely that the use of this technique would have completely resolved the problem. The net result is a greater sense of certainty in the results presented by Henneberg and Henneberg.
⁷¹

While the overall results for age-at-death distribution are quite comparable, it is important to reiterate that the limitations of the available ageing techniques that were used for both studies means that it is likely that a number of the adults in the Pompeian sample have been underaged. The interpretation of age-at-death from the Pompeian skeletal sample should be tempered by other evidence, such as age-related pathology. The frequency with which HFI appears, indicates that there probably were more older people in the sample than the available skeletal ageing techniques could reasonably establish. This is at variance with the suggestion by Henneberg and Henneberg that the Pompeians had relatively short lives.
⁷²