HMS Study Suggests New Narratives for Pompeii Victims

A new DNA analysis challenges existing hypotheses about the identities and relationships of victims found in Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E., per a study published in Current Biology on Nov. 7.

An international team of researchers from Harvard Medical School, the University of Florence, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology analyzed the DNA of five ancient Pompeii inhabitants, debunking prior assumptions about victims’ sex and familial relationships.

During the eruption, ash spewed by the volcano coated the city of Pompeii, preserving the bodies of some victims. During a 2015 restoration of 86 damaged casts, researchers were able to obtain DNA samples that would later be used in the study to assess the accuracy of hypotheses about the eruption’s victims.

According to Victoria C. Moses, a co-author of the study and postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s history department, one of the “biggest stories” from the research findings is that of the “House of the Golden Bracelet.”

Archaeologists had previously concluded that an adult victim wearing a gold bracelet was the mother of an infant found in their arms. This study, however, reveals that the adult was genetically male and unrelated to the infant.

Experts had also previously hypothesized that the two victims formed a family of four with two other individuals found nearby. The results of the study, however, indicate that at least three of the four were biologically unrelated.

“You start to think: how did these people relate to each other?” Moses said. “Did they know each other? Or did they just find each other in this moment of chaos? Was there adoption? Were there enslaved people in the house alongside free people? Is that what we’re seeing here? And so those are the new conjectures that can come out of this.”

Harvard Anthropology professor Christina G. Warinner, who was not affiliated with the study, said it employed “state of the art” methods, adding that “the methodological approach is really robust and strong.”

The study challenged hypotheses about other victims as well. For example, the researchers found that at least one of two individuals previously thought to be sisters was genetically male.

“We made a lot of assumptions about the relationships of people in the past based on the behaviors we observed. And these sorts of findings are forcing us to reconsider all of that,” Warinner said.

The paper also reported that the five inhabitants of Pompeii studied in the research were descended from eastern Mediterranean immigrants, corroborating genetic evidence from the city of Rome. According to the researchers, these results highlight “the cosmopolitanism of the Roman Empire in this period.”

Moses called the study “a group effort.”

Collaboration across research teams helped produce “very exciting findings that speak to everybody’s curiosity about the past,” Moses added.