A cupboard sealed for almost 2,000 years in Pompeii has yielded an intimate snapshot of one resident’s life before Mount Vesuvius destroyed the ancient Roman city, from make-up utensils and perfume to coins, cooking pots and childhood amulets.
The once-thriving city of Pompeii, near Naples, was buried by a volcanic eruption in AD 79, preserving buildings, objects and graffiti under metres of ash.
Archaeologists pieced together bits of the wooden cupboard from traces uncovered in a house on Via dell’Abbondanza, one of the busiest streets of ancient Pompeii, the site said in a statement.
“We cannot reconstruct with certainty the identity of whoever lived in the house, but these fragments bring us closer to their daily life,” said site director Gabriel Zuchtriegel.
Among the objects stored inside was a necklace comprising at least 24 tiny objects made of bone, glass paste, earthenware and rock crystal, including images of the gods Bes and Mercury, as well as miniature hands, feet, pine cones and bunches of grapes.
Such necklaces, known as crepundia, were traditionally given to Roman children both as protective amulets and as rattles whose sounds helped adults keep track of them.
They were sometimes kept into adulthood as mementos of childhood, offering a particularly personal connection to the unknown inhabitant of the house.
Other finds tell a more prosaic story of daily life.
There were tweezers, a small glass perfume or ointment bottle and an incense burner, alongside bronze, glass and ceramic vessels and cooking pots. Lead weights in a wooden box suggested that someone in the house was involved in trade.
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