The plaster casts of Romans killed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. are internationally famous, but scholars have long known that more people escaped the volcano’s destruction of the Bay of Naples than were suffocated by it. New evidence from inscriptions provides clues to where these refugees settled.
In a forthcoming open-access article in the journal Analecta Romana, archaeologist and historian Steven Tuck of Miami University explains how his creation of a database of Roman last names led him to match up records from Pompeii and Herculaneum with records from the parts of Italy unaffected by the destructive power of Vesuvius. Tuck’s goal in doing this work was not just to identify refugees but also “to draw conclusions about who survived the eruption, where they relocated, why they went to certain communities, and what this pattern tells us about how the ancient Roman world worked socially, economically, and politically.” Read more.
