Bone study fleshes out Pompeii's story
“A groundbreaking new book by Dr Estelle Lazer, archaeologist and honorary research associate with the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney, will be launched at the Nicholson Museum this Tuesday.
“Resurrecting Pompeii, published by Routledge, discusses the wealth of information that can be gained from looking at the skeletal remains of victims of the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
“Although Pompeii has been continuously excavated and studied since 1748, early scholars were seduced by the more glamorous artefacts and wall paintings yielded by the site. The less attractive evidence, the bones, was largely ignored.
“Until Dr Lazer’s work there had not been a systematic study into the wealth of victim profiling information that can be gathered from studying bones, including sex, age at death, general health and height and population affinities.
“Dr Lazer has found that, contrary to previous thinking, the victims of Pompeii were not mainly the infirm, women, children and the aged. ‘The bones look like a normally distributed population sample,’ says Professor Lazer.
“A close study of bone remains also indicate the average lifespan was much longer than previously thought. ‘The age range in the bone sample is comparable to a modern population,’ says Dr Lazer, who discovered the incidence of age-related diseases were at levels similar to today’s world.”
