Pompeii’s House of the Chaste Lovers Gives Up Two Working Animals
A fresh round of excavation inside the House of the Chaste Lovers at Pompeii has brought to light the skeletons of two large equids, recovered from a room linked to bread production. The find adds a quietly affecting chapter to the story of how animals lived, worked and died alongside the people of the ancient city.
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The two animals, recorded as RP1 and RP2 in order of discovery, lay against the western wall of a room identified as a space for working bread dough. The dig formed the final stage of cleaning operations across the last unexcavated rooms of the residence, an area already touched by earlier campaigns at the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s. Because that older work had partly disturbed the deposit, the team relied on a microstratigraphic method borrowed from the excavation of human remains, adapting its protocols to faunal material. An archaeozoologist directed the recovery of the skeletons, an archaeobotanist handled the charred wood found in connection with them, and an anthropologist contributed a taphonomic and forensic reading of the bones.
The position of the animals points to a building in transition rather than a working bakery. Evidence suggests the large bread operation that occupies the southern part of the structure was not in use at the moment of the eruption; instead, major repairs and renovation appear to have been underway. A neighbouring room had been converted into a manger and stable, fitted with a wooden feeding trough fixed to the northern wall and a quadrangular watering basin lined with hydraulic mortar in one corner. Both the trough and the basin were being dismantled or filled in when disaster struck, which may explain why the two equids had been moved into the adjacent dough room. Damage to the ancient floor there, with breaks running along the perimeter walls, indicates that this space too had fallen out of use for baking. The large work table seems to have been removed; only the negative of a posthole and three reused limestone blocks, probably its supports, remained.
A close reading of the floors connects this phase of works to a wider trauma. The original signinum pavement had sunk by around twenty centimetres along one side, a collapse plausibly tied to the earthquake that shook the city and its territory in 68 to 69 CE. The change of use that followed seems to have affected the whole building.
The skeletons themselves tell a grim and precise story. RP1, the more complete of the two, lay with its muzzle resting on its right side, turned northeast toward the central limestone block; its right hind leg was extended beneath the trunk while the left was folded against the wall. RP2 lay to the south, near the southwestern corner, in a position consistent with the animal having gone down on its right side, its skull missing and its forelimb folded forward. Both showed signs of burning and fracturing. The damage on RP1 clustered around the lower jaw in a pattern compatible with vertical compression; on RP2 the breaks spread across the ribs and forelimbs, consistent with crushing from a load above.
The cause of that crushing was found directly over the bones. A long trace of ash and charred wood, preserved for around two metres and running parallel to the western wall, lay across the remains. Analysis under reflected light, compared against wood anatomy atlases, identified the charcoal as maple, Acer sp. The object had been large, very probably a single timber, and the heavy presence of ash with little surviving charcoal indicates a fire that burned for some time before an oxygen-starved phase, linked to a pyroclastic flow, smothered the flames and preserved fragments of the wood. The beam was likely a structural element supporting an upper floor, and its fall onto the animals points to the collapse of the storey above. Tellingly, no lapilli were found around or beneath the bodies, which suggests the room was still empty of volcanic debris when the structure came down, placing the collapse in an early phase of the eruption itself, perhaps driven by the seismic shocks that accompanied it.
Preliminary study allows a first estimate of the animals’ ages. The fusion of the vertebral epiphyses in RP1 indicates an age above five or six years, while tooth wear on the incisors points to something older, in the region of ten to twelve years. RP2 was younger, between roughly three and a half and six years. Whether each was a horse, a donkey or a hybrid remains open, pending biometric, morphological and genetic analysis.
The most human detail emerged at the neck of the older animal. Beside RP1, along what is read as the withers at the base of the neck, the excavators found two superimposed iron rings, probably the metal fittings that held its harness; about ten centimetres further along, three glass paste beads, one light blue and two white, still stacked together, lay where they had likely been tied into the animal’s mane or tack. The detail reads as a gesture of familiarity toward an older working animal, a hint of attachment to a creature that was certainly exploited as labour for a commercial enterprise yet shared these rooms with the people who used it.
For the director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the episode shows what Pompeii has become beyond the beauty of its frescoes and the study of ancient material culture: a place to recover the lives cut short by the eruption, human and animal alike, and to understand how the two lived and worked together some two thousand years ago. He frames the excavation as an example of the multidisciplinary practice carried out daily at the site, where field archaeologists and laboratory specialists pool their viewpoints to reconstruct not only objects but the relationships among people, animals and the spaces of work. The analyses continue, and the interpretations offered here are expected to be tested and refined as study proceeds.
Source: Parco Archeologico di Pompeii
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