Classifying Evidence from Pompeii

Hello. Last time, you put Pompeii’s ancient history and modern excavation history on separate timelines. Now consider what those excavations actually uncover. A masonry oven, a cooking pot, a duck bone, a painted duck, and a human bone may be found within a few metres of one another, but they are different kinds of evidence. Learning to name each kind accurately is the first step toward interpreting the site without treating every find as interchangeable.

In this lesson, you will classify Pompeian evidence as architectural remains, artifacts, ecofacts, inscriptions, images, or human remains. Allow about 35–40 minutes, including a focused reading and a short video.

Six ways evidence can survive

An archaeological category describes what has survived, not yet what happened. Architectural remains are parts of built spaces: walls, floors, doorways, ovens, and fixed counters. Artifacts are things people made or substantially shaped, such as pots, coins, tools, and jewellery. An ecofact is a natural remain that can tell us about past environments or activities: seeds, food residues, and animal bones are common examples. In this lesson, human bones have their own category, human remains, rather than being grouped with animal bones.

The other two categories concern marks made to communicate or depict something. Inscriptions are writing, whether painted, scratched, stamped, or written in charcoal. Images include frescoes, figured mosaics, and drawings. These categories can overlap with the object carrying the mark: a painted wall is both a built surface and a surface bearing an image.

For a close look at all six kinds of evidence in one place, read this account of an excavated Pompeian food shop. Its purpose here is not to memorize the shop’s finds. Notice instead how often the report moves between a structure, an object, a biological remain, and a mark on a surface.

The shop’s counter is a useful anchor for the rest of the lesson. It is a built feature with jars set into it; its front carries paintings; containers and animal bones were found in association with it. Calling all of this simply “the counter” would hide distinctions that matter.

Buildings and things people made

Architectural remains are the surviving fabric and arrangement of built space. At the food shop, the masonry counter, its embedded containers, and the floor help define where activities could take place. At a bakery, an oven and the placement of grinding equipment likewise show how a space was fitted out. Architecture is more than a collection of walls: a doorway’s position or a counter’s orientation is evidence even when no loose object survives beside it.

Artifacts are made or deliberately shaped by people. The food shop’s amphorae and bronze vessel are artifacts. So are a coin, a brooch, or a millstone: an object need not be small enough to carry in one hand. Conversely, an object need not be lying loose to have an artifact aspect. A ceramic jar set into a counter is manufactured pottery and part of an installed feature.

That overlap calls for a practical rule: identify the feature you are describing before assigning its category. If you mean the built counter as a whole, “architectural remain” is the clearest label. If you mean one of its manufactured ceramic jars, “artifact” is appropriate; add that it was embedded in the counter. The label should preserve useful information, not force a false either-or choice.

The bakery image shows why this precision matters. You can see an oven and millstones. You cannot see grain being milled or bread being sold in that photograph. The equipment is evidence for a productive space, but the activity itself is an interpretation made from the equipment and its setting.

Biological traces and human remains

The shop report describes a duck bone recovered from a container, alongside other animal remains, and beans detected at the bottom of a jar. These are ecofacts: biological material rather than manufactured objects. An animal bone remains an ecofact even if people cooked the animal or left cut marks on the bone. A bone that someone carved into a pin, by contrast, would be an artifact because its manufactured form is the feature being classified.

Ecofacts do not have to be food. The report also describes a dog skeleton and fragments identified as oak. Both can supply evidence about life at the site, but neither is itself a manufactured vessel or tool. Where oak was used in a built feature, its identity as biological material and its role as construction material are both worth recording.

Human remains deserve a separate label and particular care. The shop account reports human bones, some of them dispersed by much later tunneling. They remain human remains regardless of that disturbance. What changes is how confidently their original positions can be understood—an important distinction for later lessons.

Pompeii’s famous casts introduce one further complication:

A cast is therefore evidence relating to human remains, not a body turned to stone. Casting material was introduced into voids left within volcanic deposits after soft tissues decayed. The resulting form can preserve information about a person’s outline, while surviving bones, where present, are the human remains themselves. Distinguishing the cast from the ancient material prevents a striking visual record from being mistaken for preserved tissue.

Writing is not the same as a picture

Return mentally to the food-shop counter. Its painted ducks are images; the duck bone found in a container is an ecofact. A painting can show what someone chose to depict, while a bone is a physical trace of an animal. Their association may be informative, but one is not a substitute for the other.

Nearby, writing was scratched beside a painted dog. The words are an inscription; the dog is an image. Both appear on the same decorated surface, yet they offer different forms of evidence. A mosaic showing a figure or a drawing scratched into plaster belongs with images. Readable letters scratched into plaster belong with inscriptions. Writing can also occur on a portable artifact: a stamped tile is a manufactured object bearing an inscription.

Watch these brief passages from a talk about Pompeian graffiti. Listen for the example in which a written announcement and a sketch share a wall, then for the explanation of how letters were incised into plaster.

The distinction is about the mark’s form and communicative role. Charcoal is not automatically an ecofact when it has been used to write words on a wall; in that setting, you are describing a charcoal inscription. Likewise, a sketch scratched with the same pointed tool as a written graffito is still an image. The material and technique matter, but they do not replace the classification of what was made.

Classify the evidence, then keep its setting

The six categories are most useful together. For the excavated food shop, a compact description might name the masonry counter as architecture, the amphorae as artifacts, the animal bones and beans as ecofacts, the scratched words as an inscription, the painted animals as images, and the bones of people as human remains. This describes a varied assemblage without yet claiming that every item was used at exactly the same time or for exactly the same purpose.

Two habits will keep classifications reliable:

1. Describe what is physically present. A painted duck is evidence of a depiction, not a duck bone. A cast is plaster recording a void, not preserved flesh.
2. Retain relationships and overlaps. “A ceramic jar embedded in a masonry counter” is more informative than choosing one label and discarding the other. “Human bones disturbed by later tunneling” is more informative than “bones in a shop.”

Those habits also explain why archaeological categories are not merely vocabulary. They tell you which kinds of questions a find can begin to answer. A building feature can show how space was arranged; an artifact can show what was made and used; an ecofact can preserve biological traces; writing and images can communicate different messages; and human remains can provide evidence concerning people themselves. None of these sources, taken alone, tells the entire story of a place.

What to carry forward

You can now distinguish Pompeii’s six principal evidence categories and handle cases where they meet: a painted wall, an inscribed object, or a manufactured jar installed in a fixed counter. The key is to classify the particular feature under discussion while preserving its relationship to nearby finds.

In the next lesson, you will take a further step: separating what an archaeologist observes from what they infer. Knowing whether a mark is an inscription, an image, or a biological trace will make that distinction much sharper.