DNA Evidence Is Rewriting the Stories of Victims Who Perished in Pompeii Nearly 2,000 Years Ago

In the ruins of Pompeii, visitors aren’t only able to see the houses, frescos and artifacts of the ancient city’s people. They can also “see” the people themselves: plaster casts of Pompeii citizens’ burned bodies, supposedly located right where they died after Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 C.E.

Nineteenth-century archaeologists created the casts by pouring plaster into people-shaped voids in the hardened ash that covered Pompeii, and the casts have come to represent tragic stories. In one dwelling, four figures huddled beneath a staircase have long been perceived as a family. One of the figures, thought to be the mother, holds a small child.

Now, new genetic research has upended some long-held narratives about these casts. According to a recent study published in Current Biology, the foursome in the House of the Golden Bracelet—named for the “mother’s” jewelry—are likely all male. After analyzing DNA from ancient skeletal material fused to the plaster casts, researchers concluded that none of these victims are related.

“This research shows how genetic analysis can significantly add to the stories constructed from archaeological data,” says co-author David Caramelli, an anthropologist at the University of Florence, in a statement. “The findings challenge enduring notions, such as the association of jewelry with femininity or the interpretation of physical proximity as evidence of familial relationships.”

The researchers concluded that the bracelet-wearing man had black hair and dark skin, and three of the four individuals under the stairs had ancestral roots in North Africa or the Eastern Mediterranean, per the Guardian’s Nicola Davis.

The genetic analysis also provided insight into another scene preserved in plaster casts: a pair of embracing individuals found in Pompeii’s multi-level, richly decorated House of the Cryptoporticus. Historians have hypothesized that the two people were sisters, a mother and child, or lovers. The new study rules out those first two hypotheses, per the Guardian, as the victims’ genes revealed that one was male and the pair weren’t maternally related.

“We were able to disprove or challenge some of the previous narratives built upon how these individuals were kind of found in relation to each other,” co-author Alissa Mittnik, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, tells the Associated Press’ Laura Ungar. “It opens up different interpretations for who these people might have been.”

Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli began making plaster casts in the 1860s—more than a century after the excavation of Pompeii began. His method produced chalk replicas of 104 victims whose encased bodies had decayed over the years. In 2015, researchers discovered that while none of the casts contained complete skeletons, some of them contained bone fragments. They also found that the plaster casts had been “considerably manipulated and likely creatively restored in the past,” according to the new study. This means that popular interpretations of Pompeii’s victims have been skewed by past “restorers” who decided to “enhance or alter some features of the bodies’ shapes.”

This makes genetic analysis essential to archaeologists’ understanding of Pompeii’s victims. In total, the research team analyzed 14 casts, extracting DNA from five of them. Per the statement, their findings not only reveal “unexpected variations in gender and kinship,” but also show that Pompeii was a diverse place.

During the first century C.E., the Roman Empire stretched from the British Isles to north Africa, and Pompeii was near an ancient, bustling port that regularly welcomed ships from Egypt, as Caitie Barrett, a classicist at Cornell University who wasn’t involved in the study, tells CNN’s Ashley Strickland. Additionally, as Steven Tuck, a historian at Miami University in Ohio who also wasn’t involved in the research, tells CNN, ancient Romans commonly captured and enslaved people from other lands.

The study has illuminated biases in long-held perceptions of Pompeii victims’ genders, relationships and origins.

“It shows you how little is known about some of these events,” co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, tells the Washington Post’s Carolyn Y. Johnson. “When you take this new scientific tool, you see things that are quite, quite different than reconstructions. It tells you the past is, as the cliché goes, an undiscovered country, and it’s really foreign and really different. Sometimes, what you think you see is not what it is.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.