On October 29, archaeologists in Pompeii said they had pieced together a wooden wardrobe that was never opened again. They rebuilt it from the traces left in the ground, in a house on Via dell'Abbondanza, one of the busiest streets in the center of the old city. Inside were tweezers and a small slab for mixing makeup, a glass perfume bottle, a burner meant to fill the rooms with scent, a bronze lamp, coins, cooking pots, and a necklace of at least 24 tiny charms.
The charms were the size of toys. They were made of glazed clay, bone, glass, and crystal, each pierced so it could hang. Some were tiny figures of gods. Others were hands, feet, pine cones, and bunches of grapes. They were found with the faint traces of a small bag. Romans called such strings crepundia, from a word for making noise. They were given to children, both to keep them safe and so adults could hear them moving. The beads would rattle as a child walked. Grown people sometimes kept them anyway, as a piece of childhood they did not want to lose.
The rest of the wardrobe looks like a life still in use. Makeup sat near pots and pans. A small basket held 38 bronze coins, perhaps money for ordinary spending. Lead weights lay in a wooden box, possibly for trade. A refined little cup, decorated with pine-cone scales, may have been kept less for use than for memory. None of this tells the archaeologists, for certain, who opened the doors.
Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the archaeological park, said the team still cannot reconstruct the identity of the people who lived in the house. The fragments only bring us closer to an ordinary day, and to what he describes as the human side of the past. The room had fine wall paintings, a sign of some comfort. Work tools, scent, coins, and a noisy string of childhood charms shared the same cupboard.
Pompeii is famous for its grand pictures. A wardrobe is smaller, and closer. The objects with no job left are often the ones a person could not throw away. A drawer of old beads works the same way. They keep a piece of childhood within reach.