The DNA study’s findings will inform how future victims are analyzed. When a new void is discovered and a new cast is made, the interpretive framework applied to it will need to be more cautious about sex, about kinship, and about the reading of associated objects than the framework applied to the gold bracelet adult in 1974. This is a direct, practical consequence of the 2024 study: not just a revision of the historical record but a calibration of the methods applied going forward.
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## The Language of Family in Roman Epitaphs and Literature
Roman funerary inscriptions and literary sources provide extensive evidence about how Romans described their own family relationships, and this evidence complicates any attempt to map modern nuclear family concepts onto Roman household configurations.
Funerary inscriptions — the stone epitaphs found across the Roman Empire, including several thousand preserved from Pompeii and its surroundings — use a vocabulary of relationship that includes both biological and legal categories. The terms for biological relationships — father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister — appear alongside the terms for relationships created by legal adoption, by manumission (the freeing of enslaved persons), and by patronage. An *alumnus* or *alumna* (a foundling or foster child) might be commemorated in terms of deep affection without the inscription specifying whether the relationship was biological or adoptive. A former enslaved person who had been manumitted might commemorate their former owner as a patron but also as a kind of family member, using language that implies genuine closeness rather than mere legal obligation.