Archaeologists in Pompeii have uncovered a wardrobe that no one opened again after Vesuvius buried the city in 79 CE. Thanks to the excavation data, the team could reconstruct the piece of furniture and its contents in full. It stood in House IX 11, 7, also known as the House of Cornelius Maximus, which faces Via dell’Abbondanza, one of the busiest streets in the ancient city.
The objects paint a picture of a woman’s daily life. Her grooming tools include tweezers and a small pestle for mixing makeup, plus a glass perfume bottle and an incense burner. A bronze lamp sat beside lead weights, which point to some kind of trade. The weights were stored in a small wooden box that has nearly rotted away. The shelves also held bronze, glass, and ceramic pots and pans. One fine little mug, decorated with pine cone scales, looks like more than a kitchen item.
The most personal find is a necklace of at least 24 tiny charms made of faience, bone, glass paste, and rock crystal. Each has a hole for hanging. They show gods such as Bes and Mercury, along with feet, hands, pine cones, and bunches of grapes. Scholars once took objects like these for magic tools used in spells and potions. They are actually crepundia, which means “rattles” in Latin.
Parents hung them on children to ward off harm, and the jingle told them where the child was. Adults often kept their crepundia for life, tucked in boxes or cloth bags. Here the necklace sat in a cloth bag inside the wardrobe. Roman society moved around a great deal, from slaves to rich merchants, so many people lived far from their parents and the places they grew up. A childhood charm could be one of the few things left from home.
The wardrobe held one more find, a stash of 38 bronze coins in a small woven basket called a cistella. The team studied the plant remains of the basket during the dig. Coins left behind suggest the owner or owners never had the chance to collect anything of worth, whether in money or in memory. If they were in the city during the eruption, they likely tried to run. Survivors might have returned later to dig for their goods, as other recent finds show people did, but nobody came back for this wardrobe. The owners may also have died in the disaster. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that victims without heirs left property meant to help rebuild Pompeii, a plan that never went forward. Park director Gabriel Zuchtriegel said the find lets researchers read a life through its habits, work, and keepsakes, even though the woman’s identity stays unknown.
The dig also taught the team more about the house. Workers first excavated the facade in 1912 and linked it to Cornelius Maximus based on inscriptions that have since faded, so the name is only a tentative one. The rooms behind it were investigated for the first time now, as part of a large restoration and access project at the neighboring Insula of the Chaste Lovers. The room with the wardrobe has fine fourth-style wall paintings, tied to the workshop of Via di Castricio. They point to a comfortable lifestyle that fits the central location. Renovation work was also underway when the volcano erupted, which made the house harder to live in.
Researchers also found the skeletons of at least two mice inside an amphora on a mezzanine. Lab analysis at the park points to the wood mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus. These mice normally live in fields and gardens and sneak into attics and storerooms looking for food. The two animals were not fully grown, judging from their 117 tiny bone fragments. Rodents turn up elsewhere around Vesuvius too, including the servants’ quarters of the Civita Giuliana villa and the sewers of Herculaneum. Pompeii’s residents clearly shared their homes with pests, just as people do today.
More details appear in the Pompeii Archaeological Park’s online excavation journal.