Pompeii is unusual among archaeological sites precisely because the eruption preserved so much material culture so suddenly. The city was not demolished gradually; it was covered in hours and days, leaving objects in their place of use, food on tables, paintings on walls, tools in workshops. This preservation gives Pompeii an illusion of completeness that most sites lack. The houses look as if someone has just left them. The casts look as if the people are still present.
This illusion of completeness has always carried a risk: that the apparent richness of the evidence will encourage interpretation to go further than the evidence actually supports. A house full of objects tells us what the inhabitants owned. It tells us much less about who owned what, how the household was organized, or what relationships held the various members of the household together. A plaster cast tells us what posture a person was in when the ash set. It tells us much less about who that person was.
The visual evidence of jewelry, in particular, has been over-interpreted throughout the history of Pompeii scholarship. Gold bracelets, rings, earrings, and necklaces found with casts have been used to infer the sex, status, and identity of the individuals wearing them. Some of these inferences are well-grounded: certain types of jewelry are strongly associated with women in Roman iconography and funerary art, and finding them with an individual whose osteological indicators are consistent with female sex provides reasonable, if not conclusive, evidence. The problem arises when jewelry becomes the primary indicator rather than one supporting line of evidence among many.