The bodies paint a picture of everyday life
At the time of the eruption, Pompeii was home to anywhere between 10,000 to 20,000 people. So far we’ve uncovered around 1,500 bodies of the 2,000 estimated to have died in the disaster. But we are still continuing to find them: just a few months back in June 2017, French and Italian archaeologists uncovered the bones of four people, including a teenage girl, in a workshop on the Porto Ercolano. But it’s not just the bodies from within the town itself that can tell us about ancient life. A group of at least 54 fugitives found in a cellar in the nearby town Oplontis also help paint a vivid picture.
What’s fascinating is that their remains were divided into two groups. On one side of the room sat the rich. One man, with teeth as good as anyone’s today and muscles far in excess, has been identified as one of the wealthy on the basis that his bones were stained green. This didn’t come from any thermo-chemical reaction from the volcano; instead, it came from the sheer amount of precious metal he was wearing, which came into contact with the bone once the flesh had decomposed.
In fact, the wealth around them was quite extraordinary: lots of jewelry, gold bangles, worn gold and silver coins and unworn gold coins (indicating they were being used as savings rather than currency in circulation).
Then there are the two twins found in the basement of Oplontis, whose teeth and bones—quite remarkably—show signs of congenital syphilis. If this is the case, as scientists are beginning to think, this completely overturns what has been the consensus for centuries: that it was Columbus’s men returning from the Americas in the 1400s who first brought syphilis to Europe.