After Vesuvius Buried Pompeii, Some Survivors Moved Back In

“As many as 30,000 Romans fled the ruined region in A.D. 79. But some returned, a new study reveals, and the city limped on as a fragile, ashen shantytown.

 

Of all end times tales, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. must rank near the top. The conflagration, which volcanologists say lasted 32 hours, reduced the vibrant Roman resort town of Pompeii to a scorched ruin empty of people and buried in ashy drifts as high as 30 feet.

 

Some 20,000 to 30,000 people lived in and around Pompeii; historical evidence suggests that most fled during the early stages of the disaster. Excavations dating back to 1748 have unearthed roughly 1,300 victims; most of the fatalities are believed to have occurred on the second day — 19 hours after the initial blast — when superheated clouds of ash and gas called pyroclastic flows engulfed residents who had stayed behind.

 

Today, an archaeological park at the site draws as many as four million visitors a year. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the park’s director general, has said that the focus on the physical eruption “monopolized” the city’s historical memory. But new excavations reframe Pompeii as a testament to human survival and adaptability, not just annihilation.

 

A study led by Dr. Zuchtriegel, published this summer in The E-Journal of the Excavations of Pompeii, corroborated a theory that has slowly taken shape over the last 100 years. Artifacts discovered during recent digs in the Insula Meridionalis, a neighborhood in the city’s southern quarter, revealed that an invisible, post-eruption city of what Dr. Zuchtriegel terms “outcasts and underdogs” lived among the ruins for centuries, inhabiting the upper floors of buildings that were tall enough to poke through the piles of volcanic ash.

 

In an interview, Dr. Zuchtriegel said that while archaeologists were aware of clues of Pompeii’s reoccupation, they tended to disregard them. The rush to find well-preserved Roman artifacts meant that the “faint traces” of scattered settlements were cleared away without being documented, he said.

 

The new study proposes that the refugees were joined by new arrivals who came to salvage what they could from the entombed city. “I think it’s quite normal that people would try to return as soon as possible, not only to dig for these objects but because there was little else to do,” Dr. Zuchtriegel said.

 

Locals were most likely drawn back by a powerful desire to revisit the place they had called home for decades. “It was the really desperate who came back to stay,” Dr. Zuchtriegel said. “Others might have come for some kind of catastrophe tourism.”

 

The survivors, squatters and scavengers repurposed ground-level rooms into subterranean workshops and kitchens, adding fireplaces, stoves and mills to these new cellar spaces. “We found the archaeological evidence of people who remained in Pompeii, or maybe even people who used to live elsewhere and heard this place was a kind of postapocalyptic no man’s land and then started living here,” Dr. Zuchtriegel said.

 

Coins from A.D. 161 and 325 found amid the Insula Meridionalis rubble have helped to finesse the timeline suggested by pottery fragments, and have allowed investigators to establish the age of a bread oven found inside a cistern. Among the other finds were ceramics, cooking vessels and an oil lamp bearing the Chi-Rho monogram, an early symbol of Christ, all going back to the fifth century.

 

The new paper details how, after A.D. 79, Pompeii was less a city than a makeshift encampment, a fragile, gray shantytown that grew up within the recognizable remains of its former self. With aqueducts damaged and the Sarno River redirected, inhabitants faced difficult living conditions and lost access to the key infrastructure and services common in Roman urban areas.

 

“Imagine a society where you had no social networks, no state subsidies, no insurance, no unemployment service whatsoever,” Dr. Zuchtriegel said. “It becomes some kind of anarchic situation. And then you get people who come from other towns and excavate without having any entitlement. There is no organization, no control.”

 

A ruin without horses

 

In an early example of imperial disaster relief, Emperor Titus appointed two former consuls to oversee the rebuilding of cities — including the roads, water systems, amphitheaters and temples — shattered by the eruption. To fund this effort, the former consuls were authorized to use the assets of any victims who had died without heirs.

 

Titus provided direct financial aid and materials to build baths, aqueducts and other buildings in nearby cities to help resettle refugees. His younger brother and successor, Domitian, also began extensive construction projects, specifically in the cities of Naples, Puteoli and Cumae.

 

Steven L. Tuck, a classicist at Miami University in Ohio, said that in the early hours of the eruption, many of the city’s inhabitants performed a relatively swift, if uncoordinated, evacuation. Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the event from a villa across the Bay of Naples, described the scene in a letter: “You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices.”

 

In a forthcoming book, “Escape From Pompeii,” Dr. Tuck argues that the absence of the remains of carts, wagons and horses from the stables of a city that had been full of such transportation is a sign that they were used by residents to flee. He also notes that recovered strongboxes were often emptied of money and jewelry, and that no boats were found at the ancient quay on the Sarno, indicating that many people escaped by sea.

 

A research team led by Dr. Tuck used an exacting research methodology to piece together the stories of the survivors. Combining traditional classical studies with the data analysis techniques of modern genealogy, the team spent eight years examining thousands of Roman inscriptions, from walls to tombstones, to track down refugees who had fled the eruption.

 

Roman family names unique to Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum, such as Numerius Popidius and Aulus Umbricius, were cross-referenced with those found in nearby settlements in the post-disaster period. This work helped to identify 172 survivors in 12 cities; 130 of these survivors were from Pompeii, and most had relocated near their former homes.

 

The family of Aulus Umbricius, a merchant of a popular fermented fish sauce called garum, resettled in Puteoli, a port city now known as Pozzuoli. After re-establishing their successful business, they were apparently so pleased with their new home that they named their first child born there Puteolanus, or the Puteolanean.

 

Dr. Tuck has determined that Pompeii survivors relocated for social and economic advantages, not proximity to family, although they often maintained connections through marriage and other Pompeian networks in their new cities. Survivors sought cities offering employment and community, even if it meant leaving behind blood relatives. Despite this shift in priorities, these individuals often married other Pompeian refugees, forging new social structures and reinforcing ties to their former hometown.

 

“Dr. Tuck’s survey of inscriptions at other locations where survivors and their descendants fled and started new lives,” said Pedar Foss, a classicist at DePauw University in Indiana who was not involved in the study, “creates an exciting new set of evidence to explore what kind of world took shape in the post-79 A.D. Bay of Naples.”

 

Up from the ash

 

In the 2003 book “Pompeii,” Alison E. Cooley, a classicist at the University of Warwick in England, theorized that the land near Vesuvius could have recovered substantially within 50 years, drawing a parallel to the ecological regeneration and recovery observed at Mount St. Helens after its eruption in 1980. This is possible because volcanic soils are often rich in nutrients, which allows vegetation to regrow surprisingly quickly.

 

The new study documents a gradual return of plant life to the area and the efforts of Pompeii’s residents to dig wells in search of groundwater under the ash. A newborn’s burial was found, suggesting that people reoccupying the city also buried their dead.

 

But even with a peak of perhaps 2,000 resettlers — a number floated by Dr. Zuchtriegel — Pompeii never returned to its previous prominence. The city was finally abandoned in the fifth century, possibly because of another eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 472 A.D. Pompeii was eventually forgotten, only to be rediscovered and excavated beginning in the 18th century, and elevated as a paragon of cataclysm.” [1]

 

1. After Vesuvius Buried Pompeii, Some Survivors Moved Back In. Lidz, Franz.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Sep 30, 2025.