Tombs of Pompeii: The living Dead

Lindsey Nemshick
 Why Pompeii not
Herculaneum?
 Pre-Roman Burials
 Biographies
 Marcus Porcius
 Marcus Tullius
 Arellia Tertulla
 Areas of Debate
 Conclusion
 Samnite Cemetery
 Dates: 2nd-4th Centuries BC
 Scanty Evidence
 Pottery, coins, and a bronze mirror
 Primarily inhumation burials
 Plain fossae enclosed with tiles
 What can we possibly deduce from this type of burial
practice?
 Recall:
 Roman colonization dates?
 Who defeated Pompeii?
 Colonist Contributions
 Theaters, baths, temples, town walls, and funerary
customs
 * Direct connection between Roman arrival in Pompeii
and the shift from inhumation burials to cremation
 Evidence:
 The Epidii family
 Are the placement of tombs, lining the streets, a sign
that tombs were important to the people of Pompeii?
 Or is it possible that this location, on the outskirts of
town, trivialized tombs, rendering them insignificant?
 Henrik Mouritsen
 Cyclic changes in funerary practice
 Decline in elite tombs and rise of tombs of
freedmen and freedwomen (same time)
 Did the elite shift their burials back on private
property for exclusivity?
 Potential Magnitude of Funerary Landscape
 Graffiti as “community announcements”
 Feasts
 Birthday or anniversary of the death of the
deceased
 Parentalia (Roman feast of All Souls)
 Gardens
 Meals shared
“Funerary monuments, created to immortalize the dead,
in their turn die; tombstones decay, inscriptions
weather and stone crumbles and falls. Preservation
often entails removal and reuse and once isolated from
the cemetery the role of the monument, to mark and
protect the last remains of human life, becomes
increasingly obscure. The tombstone is an aid to
memory but human memory is all too short and every
culture ultimately cannot avoid neglecting and
forgetting its mounting dead.”
-Valerie M. Hope
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