A set of 24 miniature pendants and 38 bronze coins were sitting in a wooden cupboard in a Pompeii house when the Archaeological Park of Pompeii opened it, roughly 2,000 years after the door was last shut. The pendants, called crepundia, are protective amulets of the kind Roman children wore on a necklace, and they came out alongside tweezers, a perfume bottle, cooking pots and a box of lead weights.
The tech news worth your time: 400,000+ professionals from Google, Apple and OpenAI read Techpresso, a daily email with the most interesting tech news and insights.
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
The cupboard stood in House IX 11, 7, on one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, and the park’s own excavation report was published on 29 October 2026. Reconstructing the contents has turned a single piece of furniture into one of the most detailed domestic snapshots Pompeii has produced in recent years, though the people who owned it remain anonymous.
House IX 11, 7 and the cupboard on Via dell’Abbondanza
The house faces Via dell’Abbondanza and is traditionally called the House of Cornelius Maximus, a name based on inscriptions recorded on the facade when it was first dug in 1912. Those inscriptions can no longer be read, so the attribution is uncertain, as Arkeonews reported in its summary of the find. The dig belongs to a restoration and accessibility project that also covers the neighboring Insula dei Casti Amanti.
In the park’s e-journal, Giuseppe Barbella describes the piece of furniture as an armarium, a Latin term for a storage cabinet, and notes that it was never reopened once it was closed on the day of the eruption. That detail gives the assemblage unusual integrity. Objects in a sealed cabinet were not tidied, looted or moved by later occupants, so their arrangement still reflects how a household chose to store things in AD 79.
Twenty-four crepundia in faience, bone, glass paste and rock crystal
The amulets are small pendants that once hung together on a necklace. Materials include faience, bone, glass paste and rock crystal. Motifs range across Bes, the Egyptian dwarf deity associated with households and children, and Mercury, the Roman god of travelers and commerce, as well as human hands and feet, pine cones, bunches of grapes and a winged-shoe pendant.
The word crepundia comes from the Latin crepare, to rattle. The pieces would have jingled as a child moved, which is part of how they worked as protection: noise and shape were thought to guard a young wearer. The park interprets this group as a child’s amulet set that adults may have kept afterward as a keepsake, a reading that fits objects stored with grooming tools and household vessels rather than discarded.
Roman writers treated crepundia as more than toys. In Roman comedy, a foundling’s trinkets are the proof that lets a parent recognize a lost child, which shows how personal and recognizable such sets could be. A necklace of 24 pieces in four or more materials, with gods, body parts and food symbols among them, reads as a deliberately assembled charm collection rather than a random handful, even if no single item can be tied to a named owner.
38 coins, lead weights and a mouse skeleton
The 38 coins are bronze and were stored in a small woven container made of plant fibers. Alongside them were tweezers, a tool for mixing cosmetic pigments, a glass container for perfume or ointment, an incense burner, a bronze lamp, and bronze, glass and ceramic vessels, among them a small jug with a pine-cone-scale pattern. Bronze was the metal of everyday small change, so a basket of 38 pieces points to pocket money or household cash rather than a hoard, and the report does not treat it as a savings stash.
A small wooden box held lead weights, which suggest the household may have handled some commercial activity, although the park says their exact function still needs to be assessed. An amphora in the same space contained the fragmentary skeletons of two young wood mice, Apodemus sylvaticus, an unglamorous reminder that the cupboard sat in a working house with pests like any other.
Limits of the Pompeii cupboard evidence
The Archaeological Park’s director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, is paraphrased in the Arkeonews report as stressing that the value of the find lies in how ordinary objects, such as personal-care items, work tools and possible keepsakes, relate to one another, rather than in any single treasure. The room has Fourth Style wall paintings, which place its decoration in the last decades before the eruption.
Arkeonews quotes the report’s own limit plainly: the cupboard does not reveal the fate of the people who left it behind. Nothing in the finds shows whether the household escaped the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius. A separate park announcement from Region IX described two victims found in a nearby insula in the same neighborhood, so the area’s human story is being excavated in parallel with its objects.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
The tech news worth your time: Subscribe to Techpresso →
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
More from Morning Overview
- The NSA says three phone features should be off whenever you aren’t using them
- Hurricane Hunter radar shows four warning signs that a tropical cyclone is about to strengthen, a University of Miami study found
- Tropical Storm Rachel is dumping up to 12 inches on four Mexican states on its way to major hurricane strength
- The FTC says Lens.com doubled the price shoppers saw in Google ads
