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Ancient DNA has revealed surprises about the identities of some of the people who disappeared from the ancient Roman city of Pompeii after a volcanic eruption, overturning misconceptions about their genetic kinship, parentage and gender.
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, the volcano spewed hot, deadly gases and ash into the air, slowly killing most of the city’s population. Ash and volcanic rocks called pumice then covered Pompeii and its inhabitants, preserving the scenes of the victims of the city’s destruction like an eerie time capsule.
Excavations first began unearthing the forgotten city in 1748, but it wasn’t until 1863 that archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli developed a method for making plaster casts of some of Pompeii’s victims. The soft tissue of the ash-covered bodies decomposed over time, so Fiorelli poured liquid chalk into some of the outlines left by the bodies to preserve the shapes of the 104 people.
Narratives formed based on the positioning of some of the remains, including that of an adult wearing a bracelet holding a child who was thought to be the child’s mother. Similarly, a group of bodies found together were suspected to be sisters.
Now, during modern attempts to restore some of the casts, researchers have extracted bone fragments from the plaster and sequenced the DNA from them, revealing that none of these assumptions are true.
The findings, published Thursday in a new study in the journal Current Biologyare changing researchers’ understanding of the demographics of the population at Pompeii, as well as how the bodies found together are related to each other.
“The scientific data we provide is not always consistent with common assumptions,” study co-author David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, said in a statement.
“These findings challenge traditional gender and family assumptions.”
A window into the ancient past
The unique preservation of the tragic images of the last moments of its citizens in Pompeii has given archaeologists a way to understand what life was like during the Roman Empire.
Located about 22.5 kilometers southeast of Naples in present-day Italy’s Campania region, Pompeii was geographically ideal because of its port, according to the study. While the Greeks, Etruscans and Samnites tried to conquer it, Pompeii became a Roman colony, the authors of the study pointed out. But the eruption of Vesuvius wiped it and other nearby Roman settlements off the map.
The ash spewed out by the volcano coated the bodies of people and animals and covered buildings, monuments, mosaics, frescoes, sculptures and other artifacts in Pompeii and other surrounding cities. Rain after the eruption caused the bodies to become cemented within the ash, and the hardened ash preserved the outlines of whatever it covered, according to the study.
When excavations began at the site of Pompeii centuries later, archaeologists discovered nearly 1,000 silhouettes of people, isolated and grouped together, in houses, squares, streets, gardens, and outside the city walls.
In 2015, the Pompeii Archaeological Park began efforts to restore 86 of the 104 casts originally made by Fiorelli. X-rays and CT scans showed that while none of the casts contained complete skeletons, bone fragments were in many of them. The scans also showed that archaeologists and restorers initially worked with the casts centuries ago, manipulating them — enhancing and changing aspects of the body’s shape, removing bones and inserting stabilizers like metal rods.
The Pompeii Archaeological Park invited the study team to investigate bone fragments and teeth that were available due to earlier damage to the cast, said co-author David Caramelli, director of the biology department and professor of anthropology at the University of Florence in Italy. The study team included the former director of the archaeological park, Massimo Osanna, the current director, Gabriela Zuchtriegel, and the park’s anthropologist dr. Valerio Amoretta.
Together, park scientists and the study authors are working on a larger project to better understand the genetic diversity that was present in Pompeii during the Roman Empire.
“It’s a ‘genetic’ photo of a Roman city from 2,000 years ago,” Caramelli said by email.
Some of the bones were mixed directly with the plaster used in the casts and were incredibly fragile, but the team was able to extract and analyze DNA from multiple fragments.
The remains that were studied were found in various locations preserved within the archaeological park, including the House of the Golden Bracelet, the House of Cryptoporticus and the Villa of Mysteries.
The House of the Golden Bracelet, a terraced structure decorated with colorful frescoes, was named after an adult who was found carrying the object with a child riding on his side. Next to them was another adult who is assumed to be the child’s father. All three were found at the foot of the stairs leading to the garden, while the other child was discovered a few meters away, possibly separated from the others as they tried to escape into the garden.
Two adults and a child are believed to have died when a staircase collapsed as they tried to escape, possibly to a nearby port.
Traditionally, researchers considered the person wearing the bracelet to be the child’s mother. But genetic analysis revealed the pair to be an unrelated adult man and child, Reich said. The adult male probably had black hair and dark skin.
The new study reveals a lot about our own cultural expectations, said Steven Tuck, a professor of history and classics at Miami University in Ohio. Tuck was not involved in the new study.
“We expect a woman to be comforting and motherly, so much so that we assume the comforting figure is a woman and a mother, which is not the case here,” Tuck said.
Learning more about the human remains at Pompeii can help others appreciate those who lost their lives in the disaster, said Caitie Barrett, an associate professor in the classics department at Cornell University. Barrett was also not involved in the new study.
“Whatever their relationship was, this is someone who died trying to protect a child and who gave that child their last moments of human comfort,” she said.
The house Cryptoporticus was named after the house’s underground passage with openings that stretched along three sides of the property’s garden. The walls of the home were decorated with scenes inspired by Homer Iliad. While nine people were found in the garden in front of the house, casts could only be made for four of them.
The two bodies appeared to be embracing, leading archaeologists to hypothesize that they were two sisters, mother and daughter, or lovers.
The new analysis showed that one person was between 14 and 19 years old at the time of death, while the other was a younger adult. While gender assessment was not possible for one of them, the other was genetically classified as male.
The Villa of Mysteries is named after a series of frescoes, dating from the first century BC, which depict a ritual dedicated to Bacchus, the god of wine, fertility and religious ecstasy, according to the study’s authors. The villa had its own wine press, common for wealthy families at the time.
Multiple people were found in the house and it was clear that they died during different points of the eruption. The bodies of two adults, believed to be women, and a child were discovered where they had fallen to the ground floor of the house, while another six groups of remains ended up in ash piles in the same house, suggesting they had survived the first wave of attacks . eruption, only to die later.
One person was found alone in a room with a whip and five bronze coins and was wearing an engraved iron ring with a female figure on it. The man was thin and about 1.85 meters tall, and according to the marks on his clothing, he was probably a mansion guard who stayed at his post until the end, the researchers said.
Genetic data collected during the research revealed that Pompeii was a cosmopolitan city filled with people of diverse origins, the study authors said.
Many are descendants of recent immigrants to Pompeii from the eastern Mediterranean, reflecting broader patterns of mobility and cultural exchange in the Roman Empire, said study co-author Alissa Mittnik, a group leader in the archaeogenetics department at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a fellow in the Reich lab at Harvard. .
At the time, the Roman Empire stretched from Britain to North Africa and the Middle East, while Pompeii was located along one of the busiest ports in the ancient world, with ships arriving regularly from Alexandria, Egypt, Barrett said.
“Moreover, this part of southern Italy had an even longer history of international connections – the first Greek settlements in the Gulf of Naples date back more than 800 years before the eruption [Mount] Vesuvius,” Barrett said by email. “So it makes sense that the background and appearance of the population reflected this cosmopolitan history.”
The study is a great reminder of the nature of the Roman definition of family, which included all members of a household, not just immediate members, Tuck said.
“The ethnic composition of the deceased with so many Eastern Mediterranean features reminds us to be aware of the common Roman practice of enslavement and regular manumission (release from slavery) of foreigners,” Tuck said. “We know of it from Pompeii, and can trace some of these men by their names in the later years of the city, but the stories told or supposed of these bodies assume blood family, not slavery, marriage, manumission, adoption, and all the other ways in which families created in the Roman world of Pompeii.”
Understanding the genetic diversity present in Pompeii is reshaping the way scientists understand the city and its inhabitants, said Dr. Michael Anderson, Chair of the Classics Department and Professor of Classical Archeology at San Francisco State University. Anderson was not involved in the new study.
“It helps demolish the European ‘ownership’ of the so-called ‘classical world’ and shows the extent to which these are delusions invented in the 18th and 19th centuries of our time, which do not reflect ancient reality,” Anderson wrote in an email. “Much of the contemporary interest in Pompeii is driven by the desire to explore dramatic stories of death and destruction, to see ourselves reflected in the past, and is therefore a creation of a particular present, particularly that of the time of the original discovery. It is fantastic to see these old misconceptions finally exposed and replaced by a much more diverse, interesting and scientific reality.”
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