Rome · AD 79 · Pompeii, Campania, Italy
Pompeii wardrobe abandoned in AD 79 held a child's charm necklace and 38 coins
The wood rotted away but the hardened ash kept its shape, and inside lay cosmetics, lead weights, bronze coins and 24 childhood amulets left behind by the owner.
Pompeii, Italy Archaeologists at Pompeii have found the imprint of a wooden wardrobe left behind when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. Inside were cosmetics, lead weights, 38 bronze coins and a necklace of children's amulets.
The wood took almost 2,000 years to rot away. By then the volcanic ash had hardened around it and kept its shape. The same process lies behind Pompeii's famous plaster casts of bodies.
The team from the Pompeii Archaeological Park reported the find in the E-Journal degli Scavi di Pompei. The paper is by the park's director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, with Chiara Comegna, Saverio De Rosa, Domenico Esposito, Younes Naime, Giuseppe Scarpati and Ausilia Trapani.
A house under renovation
The house, catalogued as IX 11, 7, faces the Via dell'Abbondanza, one of the city's main streets. Its façade was excavated in 1912 and has long been tied to a man called Cornelius Maximus. The authors consider that link doubtful. It rested on inscriptions that can no longer be seen.
The newly excavated rooms lie at the back. The work is part of the restoration of the neighbouring Insula of the Chaste Lovers. The team removed about 2.5 metres of earth bank so that scaffolding put up in the 1980s and 1990s could come down. One room, tentatively a dining room, keeps a floor from the 2nd century BC.
The house was being renovated when the volcano erupted. The ceilings of the two main rooms had only bare plaster. A window cut later had broken part of a finished painting. The walls show peacocks, panthers and dolphins on yellow backgrounds, in the last of Pompeii's wall-painting fashions.
The wardrobe was a corner cabinet with two wings, each about 2 metres long. The room's ceiling fell as the volcanic current arrived, half burying it. More than half its height survived.
The upper shelves held pottery, cooking pots and fragments of thin eggshell ware from Baetica, in today's southern Spain. The authors link several objects with the world of women: a glass perfume bottle, bronze tweezers and a slate slab for grinding pigments. They leave the question open.
Someone had been there before the archaeologists. At an unknown date, a person tunnelled in from the west and stacked bronze tableware on the floor, apparently to collect later. It was never taken.
Childhood charms in an adult's cupboard
Pressed against the inner wall of the south wing lay 24 tiny pierced objects. They are made of faience, bone, glass paste and rock crystal. Some show Bes, a god of Egyptian origin who protected homes and children, and Mercury, the Roman god of merchants.
Romans called such necklaces crepundia, from the Latin crepare, "to make a noise". Parents hung them on children for protection, and the rattle let them hear the child moving. These charms had been in a cloth bag. A falling post tilted the shelf, and the bag slid and split.
Similar amulets have turned up in adult settings elsewhere in Pompeii, including a cabinet in the House of Helvius Severus. The researchers suggest some people kept them as a memento of childhood. That would fit a Roman world where many people lived far from their families.
On the bottom shelf were a small wooden box and eight lead weights. The authors suggest a professional use, perhaps selling goods, but cannot confirm it. Beside them lay a lump of 38 bronze coins in a small basket, possibly of esparto grass.
Two coins are older: one from Ibiza and a sestertius struck under Claudius in the name of Germanicus. The other 36 were minted under Nero between AD 64 and 67. Their face value was at least 56 asses, the basic bronze coin. A Pompeian graffito priced Falernian, a prized wine, at four asses, so the hoard would have bought 14 cups.
A collapsed loft in another room held amphorae, including an olive oil jar from North Africa. Inside it were 117 tiny bone fragments from at least two young mice, most likely wood mice.
We cannot reconstruct with certainty the identity of whoever lived in the house, but these fragments bring us closer to their everyday life.
Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park
The coins suggest the owner never recovered their valuables. They may have fled and never returned, or died in the eruption. The paper mentions a passage by Suetonius on Emperor Titus using the property of victims without heirs to rebuild the stricken cities. It warns that the passage needs careful study before it is linked to the wardrobe's owners. The evidence cannot decide between flight and death.
Sources
- A Pompeii Wardrobe Left Behind in the Eruption Held a Childhood Charm Necklace and 38 Coins (La Brújula Verde)
Paper: G. Zuchtriegel, C. Comegna, S. De Rosa, D. Esposito, Y. Naime, G. Scarpati, A. Trapani, Lo scavo di una domus nell'insula IX 11: il rinvenimento di un armarium con crepundia, E-Journal degli Scavi di Pompei 11 (2026)
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