Pompeii cupboard holds a childhood charm necklace and 38 coins

When Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in AD 79, one wooden cupboard in a house on Via dell’Abbondanza went down with everything inside it. Archaeologists have now reconstructed that cupboard and recovered its contents: a necklace of at least 24 tiny charms, 38 bronze coins in a woven basket, cosmetic tools, cooking vessels and a set of lead weights. Together, they offer a rare, close look at one household’s belongings.

A house on one of Pompeii’s busiest streets

The cupboard stood in House IX 11, 7, which faces Via dell’Abbondanza, one of the city’s main streets. Excavators uncovered the facade back in 1912, and inscriptions that have since faded led scholars to tentatively link the house to a man named Cornelius Maximus. The rooms behind the facade stayed unexcavated until recently, when the Archaeological Park of Pompeii began a restoration and accessibility project at the neighboring Insula dei Casti Amanti (the Chaste Lovers).

The room with the cupboard has Fourth Style wall paintings that the team attributes to a workshop on Via di Castricio, which suggests a comfortable household. Building work was also under way when the eruption struck, which may have made parts of the house less livable.

Rebuilding a cupboard that rotted away

The wood itself did not survive. Over nearly 2,000 years it decomposed, so the team worked out the cupboard’s shape from fragments and from impressions it left in the volcanic deposits. The objects inside stayed in place, which let the researchers record how people arranged them.

What was inside

The most striking item is a necklace of at least 24 miniature pendants made of faience, bone, glass paste and rock crystal, kept in a cloth bag. The charms show figures such as the gods Bes and Mercury, along with feet, hands, pine cones and bunches of grapes. Researchers identify them as crepundia, the amulet necklaces that Roman parents hung on children for protection and, in a practical sense, to keep track of them. Some earlier scholars read such objects as magical tools.

Nearby, a small woven basket held 38 bronze coins. The cupboard also contained tweezers, a small pestle for mixing cosmetics, a glass perfume bottle, an incense burner and a bronze lamp. Kitchenware included bronze, glass and ceramic vessels, among them a fine cup decorated with pine cone scales. A set of lead weights, kept in a small wooden box that has almost entirely rotted, may point to some kind of trade.

On a mezzanine above, the team also found the remains of at least two young wood mice inside an amphora. Lab work identified them from 117 tiny bone fragments.

Why a childhood necklace matters

The researchers note that adults often kept their childhood charms for life. In a society where many people lived far from the place they were born, such an object could be one of the few links to a person’s origins. Park director Gabriel Zuchtriegel said the most ordinary objects restore the human dimension of the past, and that the finds bring researchers closer to the household’s daily life.

The contents also hint at the final days. Valuables such as coins stayed behind, which suggests the occupants had little chance to retrieve their belongings. They may have fled and never returned, or they may have died in the eruption. The team also points to the Roman historian Tacitus, who described property of victims without heirs being set aside to help rebuild the city, a plan that never went ahead.

What we still do not know

The house’s link to Cornelius Maximus rests on faded inscriptions, and the team says it cannot say with certainty who lived there in AD 79. Some Italian headlines describe a woman’s wardrobe, but the park’s account does not identify the owner’s sex. The lead weights suggest commerce, but they do not show what the household traded. Even the fate of the residents remains open, and this find cannot settle it.

What the cupboard does show is how much a single sealed space can say about everyday Roman life, from beauty routines to childhood keepsakes carried into adulthood.

Sources

• Archaeological Park of Pompeii release and study (Zuchtriegel, Comegna et al., 2026, E-Journal degli Scavi di Pompei 11), as reported by Archaeology Magazine
• HeritageDaily
• Reuters via Internazionale