New archaeological evidence confirms Pompeii was reoccupied soon after the devastating 79 AD eruption, persisting as a precarious settlement for centuries. Survivors unable to rebuild elsewhere, alongside likely homeless individuals seeking shelter and valuables, returned to inhabit the devastated city.
Traces of life resurfacing in the buried city, unearthed during safety and restoration work on the Insula Meridionalis, support existing theories. As published in the e-journal of the Pompeii excavations, findings indicate people returned to the disaster site, eventually establishing permanent dwellings within the re-emerging upper floors of ruined buildings, still partially buried in ash. Life returned to ancient houses and structures, though former ground-floor rooms became basements or caves repurposed for hearths, ovens, and mills.
While inscriptions found elsewhere in Campania confirm some Pompeians survived, many lacked the means to start anew elsewhere. This likely explains why inhabitants returned to the destroyed city, where the upper levels of buildings remained discernible. These original residents may have been joined by newcomers with nothing to lose. Initially, they lived in an “ash desert,” but vegetation soon returned.
Beyond shelter, Pompeii offered the lure of scavenging buried valuables. This uncontrolled activity may have prompted Emperor Titus to dispatch two former consuls as “curatores Campaniae restituendae” (overseers for restoring Campania). Their mandate included redistributing the property of those who died without heirs to afflicted cities and promoting the refounding of Pompeii and Herculaneum. However, this refounding attempt failed; Pompeii never regained its pre-eruption vitality.
Archaeological data instead points to a precarious settlement lacking Roman urban infrastructure and services. People lived in rudimentary conditions, yet this occupation endured into late antiquity, finally ending in the 5th century AD – possibly coinciding with another devastating eruption (the Pollena eruption).
“The epochal destruction of 79 AD monopolized memory,” commented site director and study co-author Gabriel Zuchtriegel. “The faint traces of reoccupation were literally removed, often swept away without documentation. Thanks to new excavations, the picture is clearer: post-79 Pompeii re-emerges, not as a city, but as a precarious gray settlement, a sort of camp, a favela among the still-recognizable ruins of the former city. We archaeologists feel like psychologists of the earth’s buried memory: we bring out the parts history erased.”