The paper’s title was “Ancient DNA challenges prevailing interpretations of the Pompeii plaster casts.” The word “challenges” was carefully chosen. What the study produced was not a correction of a fraud but a demonstration that the assumptions built into visual interpretation, and into the long history of presenting Pompeii’s dead to the public, do not survive genetic scrutiny. The plaster casts had told stories. The DNA refused to confirm them.
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## The City That Stopped in AD 79
Pompeii in the late summer of 79 CE was a prosperous Roman port city of perhaps eleven thousand to twenty thousand inhabitants, situated about fourteen miles southeast of Naples on the Bay of Naples. It had been a Roman colony since the first century BCE, and by 79 CE it bore the visible marks of decades of Roman investment: public baths, an amphitheater, temples, a forum, shops lining the main streets, and private houses ranging from modest dwellings to grand villas with painted garden rooms and mosaic floors.
The city was not entirely Roman in origin or composition. Pompeii had been inhabited by Oscans, Samnites, and Greeks before Roman control, and its population in 79 CE included people from across the Mediterranean world — traders, freed persons, enslaved individuals, immigrants, and members of families whose roots ran back generations in the city as well as newcomers who had arrived within living memory. The Roman Empire at this period was an institution that moved people across enormous distances, through commerce, military service, enslavement, and migration, and Pompeii was a node in that system.