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A necklace of at least 24 tiny charms, given to Roman children as a protective amulet, was among the finds from a wooden cupboard sealed for almost 2,000 years in Pompeii.
The cupboard, reconstructed by archaeologists from traces found in a house on Via dell’Abbondanza, one of the busiest streets of ancient Pompeii, has produced an intimate picture of one resident’s life before the city’s destruction.
In a statement, the site said the objects ranged from make-up utensils and perfume to coins, cooking pots and childhood amulets.
Mount Vesuvius buried the once-thriving city, near Naples, under metres of ash in a volcanic eruption in AD 79.
A vast number of buildings, objects and graffiti were preserved by that ash.
In the case of this cupboard, archaeologists were able to piece it together from fragments and traces discovered inside the house.
“We cannot reconstruct with certainty the identity of whoever lived in the house, but these fragments bring us closer to their daily life,” site director Gabriel Zuchtriegel told Reuters.
The necklace’s tiny objects were made up of bone, glass paste, earthenware and rock crystal.
They included images of the gods Bes and Mercury, as well as miniature hands, feet, pine cones and bunches of grapes.
Necklaces of this kind were known as crepundia, and were traditionally given to Roman children both as protective amulets and as rattles whose sounds helped adults keep track of them.
Such necklaces were sometimes kept into adulthood as mementos of childhood, offering a particularly personal connection to the unknown inhabitant of the house.
Perfume, money and mice
Other finds, including tweezers, a small glass perfume or ointment bottle and an incense burner, tell a more prosaic story of daily life.
Bronze, glass and ceramic vessels and cooking pots had also been stored in the cupboard.
Lead weights in a wooden box suggested that someone in the house was involved in trade, and a small woven container held 38 bronze coins.
The fact that both money and objects with apparent sentimental value remained behind suggests the owners had no time to retrieve them after Vesuvius erupted.
“Pompeii is not just a place of great works of art. It is also a place where the most ordinary objects restore the human dimension of the past,” Zuchtriegel said.
“The value of this discovery lies in the possibility of reading together the different traces of a life: personal habits, work and memories.”
The house sits in a central area of Pompeii, and has been tentatively associated with a man named Cornelius Maximus because of inscriptions discovered there.
Its facade was first excavated in 1912, but archaeologists have only now investigated some of the rooms behind it as part of a wider restoration project.
The excavation also provided evidence that some problems of urban living have changed remarkably little in two millennia.