Carved Bone Plaques Show How Pompeii’s Funeral Beds May Have Looked, Soldiers and Shields Included

Funeral furniture from a buried city

Most people picture Pompeii as a city frozen by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Its cemeteries tell a different story, one about how Pompeians said goodbye. Archaeologists working outside the Porta Nola gate have now published a detailed study of the carved bone that once decorated the beds on which some wealthy residents were laid out and cremated.

The paper appeared online on 13 November 2026 in the Journal of Roman Archaeology. Pilar Mas Hurtuna, Llorenç Alapont Martín and Agustín Ángel Diez Castillo, all linked to the Universitat de València in Spain, analyzed more than 2,000 bone fragments. They focus on the military imagery carved into them.

What the team found

Roman funeral beds (the Latin term is often given as lectus funebris) were wooden couches with bone or ivory fittings. The wood burned away on the pyre and in time. The bone survived in pieces, mixed with cremation ashes, charcoal and burial deposits.

The Porta Nola necropolis excavations of 2015, 2016 and 2017 produced several large groups of fragments. About 450 pieces came from the tomb of Marcus Obellius Firmus. Another tomb, called Tomb A, yielded roughly 540 fragments, some inside a ceramic urn. A nearby cremation deposit added about 500 more, including an almost complete bed leg. A further urn held 91 elements in total.

Among the decorations, the authors identify helmeted heads in profile and miniature shields. Some helmets imitate the Attic style, while others show Hellenistic military equipment. The shields come in hexagonal, rectangular and crescent shapes, and many resemble Macedonian and other Hellenistic designs. Some plaques are small profile pieces, while others are larger, medallion-like ornaments.

Red paint and gold leaf

The finds also carry color. At the Casa del Fabbro, red pigment survives in the carved grooves of soldiers’ heads and shields. A garland from the Obellius Firmus tomb keeps traces of gold leaf. The authors do not argue that whole beds were gilded. The gold appears as a detail on a single ornament, so the beds probably looked richly decorated rather than covered in gold.

A possible furniture workshop

The Casa del Fabbro, a house in Pompeii excavated between 1926 and 1933, gave the team a second body of evidence. One room, room 8, held 20 decorative plaques and 322 strip fragments, including 13 shields. The carving shares themes and techniques with the cemetery material, such as scale patterns cut with a curved gouge.

The authors link the two groups through shared production methods and suggest a common workshop context in Pompeii during the later Julio-Claudian period. They stop short of proof. The house may have stored ornaments, kept reused pieces or held components for new furniture, so it did not necessarily build the cemetery beds itself. The decoration dates broadly to the Tiberian through Neronian periods, which fits first-century AD furniture and the damage and rebuilding that followed the earthquake of AD 62.

Why soldiers on a deathbed?

The imagery of warriors raises an obvious question: did the dead serve in the army? The researchers do not think the motifs record a career. They suggest the soldiers and shields may express family aspirations or triumph over death, a symbolic language that fit a funeral. Comparable decorations appear at sites in Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Britain, which suggests the style belonged to a wider Roman fashion rather than to Pompeii alone.

The study also notes that some beds may have served as everyday couches in the home before they entered a funeral. How often that happened remains unknown.

Caveats and open questions

The beds themselves do not survive, so the reconstruction rests on scattered fragments from cremations. The source describes the owners as people who could afford luxury furniture, but the bone alone does not reveal the wealth, rank or identity of everyone buried. The workshop link also remains a hypothesis built on stylistic and technical similarity. Further excavation and a closer look at other Pompeian houses could test it.

Why it matters

These small carvings show that Pompeian funerals could involve craftsmanship, color and symbolism well beyond a simple burial. They also connect the city’s cemeteries to its workshops and to a Roman-wide taste for decorated couches. The story belongs to the years before the eruption, when Pompeii was a working city with trades that served both the living and the dead.

Sources

• Mas Hurtuna, Alapont Martín and Diez Castillo (2026), “Military iconography on bone plaques for funerary beds from the Porta Nola necropolis and the Casa del Fabbro in Pompeii,” Journal of Roman Archaeology (DOI 10.1017/S1047759426100993)
• Arkeonews, “Pompeii’s Luxury Funeral Beds Were Decorated with Soldiers, Shields and Gold”

Image credit: Mas Hurtuna et al., Journal of Roman Archaeology (2026), as published by Arkeonews.