Archaeologists working in Pompeii have uncovered an unusually intimate group of possessions inside the remains of a wooden wardrobe: a child’s necklace bearing numerous charms, small personal-care objects, a glass perfume bottle and coins. Details of the discovery were reported on October 30, 2026, from excavations in a residence along Via dell’Abbondanza, one of the ancient city’s busy streets. The objects survived in a home overwhelmed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.
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The necklace is a crepundia, an assemblage of small pendants traditionally associated with children in the Roman world. More than 20 elements are reported, including representations connected with Bes and Mercury. Bes was an Egyptian deity whose image could have protective associations, especially around domestic life and children; Mercury belonged to the Roman pantheon. The combined imagery suggests a family environment in which visual symbols crossed the religious and cultural boundaries of the Mediterranean.
According to Pompeii Archaeological Park director Gabriel Zuchtriegel, such necklaces could also have practical and emotional functions. Pendants made sound as a child moved and could help identify a child or connect that child to relatives. These uses need not be alternatives to religious meaning. Ancient household objects frequently combined adornment, identity, affection and forms of perceived protection, without offering proof that a protective power objectively existed.
The wardrobe held far more than the necklace. Archaeologists reported tweezers, an incense burner, a bronze lamp, cooking vessels, a wooden box with lead weights and 38 bronze coins. The weights might suggest a commercial activity, but they do not securely identify the resident’s occupation. Nor do the valuables prove the household’s fate: the possibility of a hurried evacuation is plausible, yet the surviving objects cannot reconstruct every decision made during the eruption.
The find is especially revealing because archaeological accounts of ancient Rome often emphasize temples, monuments and political figures. A modest object carried by a child redirects attention toward the emotional and symbolic lives of ordinary people. It also resists a simplistic division between ‘Roman’ and ‘Egyptian’ belief: gods, images and personal rituals moved through communities in contact with one another.
A different kind of recent evidence for how sacred spaces functioned across cultural boundaries emerged at a Roman cave sanctuary in Spain. At Pompeii, the evidence is smaller and more personal, yet perhaps more immediate. A child’s charms survived where the person who wore them did not leave a written explanation.
References
- The Guardian, reporting from Pompeii on October 30, 2026: Perfume bottle and child’s necklace among treasures found in Pompeii wardrobe.
- Pompeii Archaeological Park, institutional context: Official archaeological park website.