Cool Finds

After Mount Vesuvius Erupted, Pompeii’s Poorest Survivors Lived Amid the Rubble of the Ancient City for Hundreds of Years

Some residents who couldn’t afford to resettle elsewhere returned to the city, where they occupied the upper floors of buildings that had been buried in ash, according to new research

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

August 12, 2025

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When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., roughly 2,000 people were trapped in the ancient city of Pompeii. The victims who died in the disaster have inspired artworks, movies and TV shows, and today, archaeologists are still learning more about their final moments.

While most of Pompeii’s residents successfully fled the volcanic eruption, these survivors don’t take up as much real estate in the popular imagination. Now, a new study published in the journal Scavi di Pompei suggests that some residents who couldn’t afford to resettle elsewhere returned to their city’s ruins.

Recent excavations have revealed that residents of Pompeii’s rubble lived on the upper floors of buildings that had been buried in ash. They transformed rooms that had originally been on the ground floor into cellars with fireplaces, ovens and mills.

“As a result of the new excavations, the picture is becoming increasingly clear: A post-79 Pompeii is beginning to re-emerge,” says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, in a statement. “It was not so much a city as a precarious gray populated area, a kind of campsite with shacks sprouting up amongst the still recognizable ruins of the former city of Pompeii.”

Researchers think former residents may have been joined by newcomers who were trying to salvage valuable treasures from the ruins. These communities lived amidst the rubble for some 400 years. In the fifth century, the site was finally abandoned.

Historians had previously hypothesized that people might have occupied the city after the eruption. But since Pompeii’s ruins were discovered in the late 16th century, archaeologists have focused primarily on the breathtaking frescoes, mosaics, statues and buildings that provided unique insights into first-century life.

“Amidst the enthusiasm of reaching the levels of 79 C.E., with remarkably well-preserved frescoes and furniture still intact, the fleeting traces of the reoccupation of the site were literally removed and often swept away without any records,” Zuchtriegel adds.

At the time of Vesuvius’ eruption, Pompeii was home to between 10,000 and 20,000 residents. The remains of more than 1,000 victims have been found, and more may have perished on the city’s outskirts as they tried to flee. But even so, most residents appear to have survived the disaster.

In recent years, researchers have turned their attention to these survivors, looking for traces of them in ancient records and inscriptions. For example, they identified one former Pompeii resident, Cornelius Fuscus, who later died in a military campaign in what is now Romania.

“They put up an inscription to him there,” Steven Tuck, a historian at Miami University in Ohio, told Live Science’s Laura Geggel in 2019. “They said he was from the colony of Pompeii, then he lived in Naples and then he joined the army.”

Tuck spent years collecting family names that were unique to Pompeii and the nearby city of Herculaneum, then looking for people with those names who were living nearby after Vesuvius’ eruption. He ultimately identified more than 200 survivors across 12 cities.

“It seems as though most survivors stayed as close as they could to Pompeii,” Tuck wrote in the Conversation in 2024. “They preferred to settle with other survivors, and they relied on social and economic networks from their original cities as they resettled.”

But the survivors who returned to Pompeii couldn’t afford to resettle. They were likely joined by newcomers “who had nothing to lose,” according to the archaeological park. While these communities built new lives for themselves amid unlikely conditions, they “would never experience the same Roman support systems and infrastructure as they did before the disaster,” writes Popular Science’s Andrew Paul.

At first, the site may have resembled “a kind of ashy desert,” but new vegetation would have eventually started to grow, per the statement. Experts think residents lived an “improvised” and “anarchic” lifestyle, digging through the rubble for treasures.

“In these cases, we archaeologists feel like psychologists of memory buried in the earth,” says Zuchtriegel. “We dig up the parts that have been removed from history, and this phenomenon should lead to a wider reflection on the archaeological unconscious, on everything that was removed or obliterated or remained hidden in the shadows of other things that were seemingly more important.”

Ellen Wexler | | Read More

Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.