When Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 AD, it also preserved the paraphernalia of everyday religion, including the incense burners on which households made offerings to their gods. An international team, led by Johannes Eber of the University of Zurich and initiated by the ERC research group of Philipp Stockhammer at LMU, has now analysed ash residues from two such vessels, one from Pompeii itself and one from a nearby villa.
Using a combination of chemical, molecular and microscopic techniques, the researchers identified burned material from native regional plants alongside imported aromatics. One vessel held residue of an exotic tree resin probably sourced from tropical Africa or Asia, while molecular traces in another pointed to a grape product, consistent with the ritual use of wine depicted in Roman art and described in ancient texts. The rim of one burner carries three female figures, probably venerated ancestors.
Published in Antiquity, the findings show that even modest household rituals in Pompeii drew on trade networks stretching across continents almost 2,000 years ago, long before globalisation had a name. They also demonstrate how biomolecular archaeology can recover the sensory texture of ancient religious life, restoring the scents and substances that written sources and excavated architecture alone cannot supply to the study of everyday Roman devotion.