Researchers Look to Crowdfunding to Identify the Skull of Pompeii Hero Pliny the Elder

Ancient Origins

Gaius Plinius Secundus, better known as Pliny the Elder, was an influential administrator, officer, and author in ancient Rome. His life ended suddenly with the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. He had used his fleet of ships to rescue local citizens and carry them from Pompeii to safety. However, stories say Pliny the Elder himself did not make it out of the town alive. Pliny the Younger wrote on the horrifying eruption and asserted that his uncle was leading a group of survivors to safety when he was overtaken by a cloud of poisonous gas – he died on the beach during that rescue attempt.

Pliny the Younger told the Roman senator and historian Tacitus that he had witnessed the eruption from a distance.

Scene of destruction in the film “Pompeii 3d” (2014). (La Stampa/CC BY NC ND)

Fast forward to 1900, when Italian engineer Gennaro Matrone was excavating Pompeii and discovered the remains of 70+ people. One of the figures was found far from the others; it was graced in bracelets and rings and was wearing a large gold necklace. According to IBTImes UK, Matrone had a hunch that this was the figure of Pliny the Elder – his beliefs have never been confirmed.

Excavations of Pompeii by Gennaro Matrone in 1900. (La Stampa/CC BY NC ND)

Now, Haaretz reports that the skull of this figure from the beach is held in the collection of the Museum of the History of the Art of Medicine in Rome. It has been largely forgotten until historian Flavio Russo and Isolina Marota, an anthropologist at the University of Camerino who is best known for working on the remains of Ötzi the Iceman, decided that it could be worthwhile to check if the skull really belonged to Pliny the Elder.

 Marota told La Stampa “Considering the importance of the findings, our university has the utmost readiness to start a research project on it, perhaps in collaboration with specialized scholars and archaeologists and with the experts responsible for managing the Pompeii site.”

Some of the victims of Pompeii were sitting, some lying when the superhot gas cloud enveloped them. (Bigstock photo)

According to Haaretz, the team is trying to gain the necessary funds to complete the project through crowdfunding (they write that the “Italian cultural and scientific institutions are mired in budget troubles”). The researchers plan to use stable isotope analysis of the skull’s teeth, which was also used in the identification of Ötzi’s origins, and other methods to identify the origins of the skull. As Marota explained, “When we drink water or eat something, whether it's plants or animals, the minerals from the soil enter our body, and the soil has a different composition in every place.” Matching the isotopes with the tooth enamel to those found in soil samples can help the researchers pinpoint the skull’s homeland.

Researchers want to know for certain if this is the skull of Pliny the Elder. (Flavio Russo)

A second method Marota says the team can use is to compare the shape of the head and jaw to busts of Pliny the Elder from his time period.

A previous Ancient Origins article tells us that Pliny the Elder was born in Como, Italy in 23 or 24 AD into a powerful and elite equestrian family (akin to knights). He traveled to Rome in 35 AD and learned the art of rhetoric and public speaking. Throughout the rest of his life (while on the road, and in between careers) Pliny worked tirelessly on a variety of written works.

Pliny the Elder. (Public Domain)

 Pliny served the Roman army as a military officer of the forces, and later as leader of the cavalry, from 45 to 47 AD. He became acquainted with and wrote about several Roman emperors and discussed Germanic warfare, but his most famous work was the Naturalis Historia. Written around 77 AD, this is a thirty-seven chapter book written in ten volumes, which writer Riley Winters explains:

“utilized all of the experience Pliny went through during his travels and the knowledge of his youth to create a compilation of Roman life. The book dictated astronomy, geography, anthropology, zoology, botany, medicine, magic, and mineralogy, as well as a cornucopia of other topics. The information within has proven incredibly illuminating to both modern day historians, and to the Romans during their time.”

The oldest illustrated version (1513) of the Historia Naturalis of Plinius maior (right). Also showing a 1570 edition of the famous Greek speeches, the Logoi by Demosthenes. (CC BY SA 3.0)

 Top Image: Scene of destruction in the film “Pompeii 3d” (2014). (La Stampa/CC BY NC ND) Insert: Remains of a skull attributed to Pliny the Elder from the Museo di Storia dell'Arte Sanitaria in Rome. (Flavio Russo)

By Alicia McDermott

Two Pregnant Women and their Fetuses Latest Victims of Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption

Ancient Origins

fter being buried in ash for more than 1,900 years, new victims of the devastating eruption in the Pompeii area have been discovered, including two pregnant women and their newborn or late-term fetuses. Experts suggest that the new discovery could be a “game-changer” for Roman bioarcheology.  
The Catastrophic Eruption
Mount Vesuvius was responsible for the destruction of the city of Pompeii on August 24, 79 AD and is without a doubt the most famous volcanic eruption in history, even though not the deadliest one, as many people falsely tend to believe. Still, scientists have estimated that Mt. Vesuvius released thermal energy 100,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. For the record, before the eruption of Vesuvius, there was no word for volcano. They had to come up with one right after the catastrophic eruption. The word is derived from “Vulcan," the Roman God of Fire.

 New Skeletons are Discovered
As Fox News reports, the estimates as to how many people were killed in Pompeii vary greatly, and the number has been a heated topic of debate among historians for decades. Most historians, however, will agree that at least a thousand people were buried under dozens of feet of lava in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. It might sound macabre, but the tons of ash and hot gas that killed so many of Pompeii’s citizens, are also the reason why their bodies have been so greatly preserved.

Villa Oplontis as it is today (CC BY SA 2.0)

Surprisingly, the human remains of four more victims, two pregnant women and their newborn or late-term fetuses as Fox News reports, have been found among an estimated fifty others in a building in the nearby villa of Oplontis. Despite more than half of these fifty skeletons being unearthed during the mid-1980s and the others being partly uncovered in 1991, the human remains of the women and their fetuses were fully excavated only a few weeks ago. “This summer, I headed a small team that excavated the remaining skeletons and collected osteological data on all of the people who were trapped at Oplontis by the volcano,” Kristina Kilgrove, a bioarcheologist at the University of West Florida, wrote in Forbes.

Photomodel of skeletons in situ, Room 10, Oplontis B (Torre Annunziata, Italy). (Credit: N.Terrenato and M. Naglak, University of Michigan)

Newly Discovered Skeletons Could be “Game-Changer”
After sitting beneath a thick layer of ash for more than 1,500 years, Pompeii was accidentally discovered in 1599 when the workers who were digging a water channel unearthed frescoes and an inscription containing the name of the city. The most decorated Italian architect of the time, Domenico Fontana, visited the site to examine the finds and unearthed a few more frescoes. Unfortunately, he was also a huge prude. He re-covered them because of the excessive sexual content of the paintings. In this way, the city became buried again (thanks to censorship) for nearly another 150 years before the king of Naples, Charles of Bourbon, ordered the proper excavation of the site during the late 1740s.

Since then, Pompeii became the center of interest for thousands of archaeologists, historians and scientists. An excited Kilgrove, however, believes that the discovery of the four new “victims” could change Roman history and add even more (cultural) prestige to Pompeii, “These newly analyzed skeletons from Oplontis are a game-changer in Roman bioarcheology, since they represent people who all died catastrophically, rather than after an illness. This means that these skeletons give archaeologists a better glimpse into what life was like for people in their prime than do cemetery burials,” she wrote in Forbes.

She goes on to explain why the skeletons of the women and their fetuses could be particularly intriguing, “While their biological relationship is not in question, their disease status and diet certainly are. If the mother suffered from an intestinal parasite or an infectious disease, did that affect the fetus as well? How will the carbon and nitrogen isotopes reflect the mother's diet of food and the fetus's ‘diet’ of maternal nutrition and energy stores? For our further research, we hope to answer questions such as these that cannot be solved through study of history and archaeology alone,” she writes in Forbes.

Vesuvius erupting at Night, (William Marlow circa 1768) (Public Domain)

Only One Firsthand Account Exists
Ultimately, despite being the most famous volcanic eruption throughout the centuries, there’s only one recorded account saved that describes the catastrophic aftermath of the Mount Vesuvius eruption and it comes from Pliny the Younger. In a letter to Tacitus, Pliny describes what he experienced during the second day of the disaster:

“A dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the Earth like a flood. 'Let us leave the road while we can still see,' I said, 'or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind.' We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room. You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness forevermore.”

Top image: Skeletons in the' Boat Houses', Herculaneum (Public Domain)

 By Theodoros Karasavvas

Magnificent 3D Reconstruction of Pompeii Home Sheds Light on Life in the Ancient City Before its Destruction

Ancient Origins

Pompeii was an ancient Roman city near modern-day Naples in Italy, which was wiped out and buried under 6 meters of ash and pumice following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.  It is an eerie feeling to walk the empty streets of Pompeii and to view shops and homes left virtually untouched for nearly two millennia. One home still contains a complete loaf of bread sitting in the oven, perfectly preserved by a coating of ash. Now everyone has the opportunity to walk the streets and peer inside homes thanks to a detailed 3D digital reconstruction of an entire Pompeian city-block.

The impressive initiative is part of the Swedish Pompeii Project, which began in 2000 at the Swedish Institute in Rome, and sheds light on the lives of the people who lived and died in the ancient Roman city in the first century AD. It is now overseen by researchers at Sweden's Lund University. The researchers virtually reconstructed an entire block, including a magnificent house that belonged to a banker called Caecilius Iucundus. The home was designed to allow as much light as possible to shine into the rooms, especially in the most elaborate room known as the tabularium (city archive).
The city block that was reconstructed, called Insula VI, includes two large and wealthy estates, in addition to the house of the banker. There is also a bakery, tavern, laundry, and a garden with fountains.

An overhead view of Insula VI, the city block that was reconstructed. Credit: Swedish Pompeii Project

The well preserved mosaic floor pieces and fully intact windows made of translucent gypsum enabled archaeologists to piece together what the home would have looked like nearly 2,000 years ago.
Archeologists also studied the water and sewer systems and discovered important information about the social hierarchies of the town – namely, that retailers were dependent on wealthy families for water, which they held in large tanks or wells, until the construction of a large aqueduct in later days.

The team was led by Anne-Marie Leander Touati, former director of the Swedish Institute in Rome and now Professor of Archaeology and Ancient History at Lund University. 3D scanning of the Pompeii city block took place during fieldwork expeditions between 2011 and 2012 with the use of FARO Focus3D and FARO PHOTON 120 laser scanners.
"By combining new technology with more traditional methods, we can describe Pompeii in greater detail and more accurately than was previously possible,'' said digital archaeologist Nicoló Dell´Unto [via ScienceAlert].
The reconstruction is fully documented in the article “Reconstructing the Original Splendour of the House of Caecilius Iucundus: A Complete Methodology for Virtual Archaeology Aimed at Digital Exhibition”. The part of the city known as Insula V1 was chosen due to its location at the crossing of two of Pompeii's main thoroughfares. The project was carried out using technical and literary texts, paintings, drawings, pictures taken via drone, and scans.

Pompeii still hides many treasures and secrets. Researchers have been excavating it for centuries, but there is still a lot to discover. In September, 2015, Mark Miller from Ancient Origins, reported on a discovery of an unexpected tomb in Pompeii:
''Archaeologists have unearthed an extremely rare 4 th century BC tomb of a woman dating to before the Roman presence in Pompeii, when the Samnites occupied the area. Evidence suggests the Romans knew of the burial site and chose not to build on it, allowing the site to survive undisturbed for more than two millennia. Scholars hope the find will give important insight into the Samnite people, an Italic people who once fought against the Romans.
Inside the tomb, archaeologists found amphorae or earthenware jugs, still with substances in them. The clay jars were found to come from various parts of Italy, showing that the Samnite people had contact outside their own area on the western coast of Italy. Researchers will examine the contents of the jars, but an initial examinations revealed food, wine and cosmetics, providing a fascinating insight into Samnite diet and culture.
A French archaeological team based in Naples discovered the tomb by surprise.
“The burial objects will show us much about the role of women in Samnite society and can provide us with a useful social insight,” Massimo Osanna, the archaeological superintendent of Pompeii said , according to theLocal.it .
After the Samnite Wars in the 4 th century BC, the town became subject to Rome while still retaining administrative and linguistic autonomy. Osanna said little is known about Pompeii before Rome annexed it.
The Samnite inhabitants of early Pompeii took part in the wars against Rome along with other towns of the Campania region in 89 BC. Rome laid siege to the town but did not subdue it until 80 BC.''
Top image: Digital reconstruction of a Pompeii home. Credit: Swedish Pompeii Project.
By Natalia Klimzcak