ABSTRACT
Perhaps the greatest frustration for a number of scholars has been the fact that so much information about the Pompeian skeletal sample was lost through post-excavation processes. Though compromised, the collection of human remains that survive from Pompeii can still provide a wealth of information. Various methods can be applied to obtain a profile of the sample of victims in terms of sex ratio, ages-at-death, general health and population affinities. Apart from providing us with insight into the lives and deaths of the
people who became victims, this information can be used to test the assertion that the old, infirm, very young individuals and women made up the majority of the victims (Chapter 5).1 Some authors have offered remarkable reasoning to account for such claims. Massa,2 for example, stated that more women than men were discovered amongst the victims as ‘the wife and mother preferred to die than survive alone’. He also considered that women were more attached to their possessions than men and that a number died trying to save their jewellery and other valuables. Associated artefacts were traditionally used to establish the sex of victims
found during the course of excavations. For example, sex and age attributions were made for 194 of the thousand-plus victims documented in the excavation diaries. Of those that were identified as adults, 78 were said to be female on the basis of associated finds of earrings, necklaces and other jewellery and 35 were recorded as male.3 Physical anthropological techniques were not routinely applied for the determination of sex of in situ skeletal finds until the latter part of the twentieth century. Obviously, there was a need to employ the skeletal evidence to test the assumption that stereotypical associated finds provide an accurate indicator of the sex of an individual.
