Abby Duimering, B.S.
September 2026
(5 Minutes)

Pompeii has always drawn in nearly every kind of curious mind: classicists, archaeologists, geologists, volcanologists, and anyone fascinated by natural disaster and the human response to it. My own first exposure came in late elementary school, at a traveling exhibit “A Day in Pompeii.” Like most people who walk through it, what struck me most were the plaster casts. There’s something deeply human about seeing Pompeiians frozen in their final moments, caught in poses I could imagine myself making if I were ever caught in a disaster of that scale.

The casts, along with countless documentaries, reenactments, books, and reimaginings of the people caught in the path of Mount Vesuvius, have done a lot to humanize a tragedy that happened nearly 2,000 years ago. But there’s another, quieter way researchers have been getting to know the Pompeiians: by studying what they ate. Using stable isotope analysis, scientists have been able to reconstruct the diets of ordinary people who died in the eruption, filling in a piece of daily life that journals, frescos, or inference cannot always show.

How do stable isotope diet analyses work?

Stable isotopes are used across a surprising range of analyses and scientific fields, including ecology, geology, and anthropology. One of the more interesting applications is diet reconstruction, a method biologists and paleontologists use to study animal diets and that archaeologists use to study how diets differed across human populations in space and time. 

The method works by measuring the ratios of rare to common versions of certain elements from a specimen. Some studies use fingernails, hair, or even an individual’s bones (Nardoto et al. 2006, Minagawa 1992, White and Schwarcz 1989). These ratios vary from person to person for several reasons, but one major driver is trophic level, or an organism’s position in the food chain. 

To use a biological example, let’s think of a typical North American food web. Grass, which produces its own energy through photosynthesis, sits at the bottom of a trophic pyramid. A deer that eats the grass sits one level up. A wolf that eats the deer sits higher still. Each step up the chain leaves a distinct isotopic signature, specifically in the ratio of nitrogen-14 and nitrogen-15 (e.g Urton and Hobson 2005). The ratio between carbon-13 and carbon-12 can clarify what types of plants an individual ate (Schwarcz and Schoeninger 2011).

By comparing an individual’s carbon and nitrogen ratios to the ratios found in candidate food sources, researchers can identify which foods most plausibly made up that person’s diet (Schwarcz and Schoeninger 2011). Statistical models can even rank those food sources from largest to smallest dietary contribution. Scientists have used this approach for years to reconstruct the diets of past people and cultures, and Pompeii is no exception.

What did Pompeians eat?

Diet analysis of Pompeiian remains, conducted by researcher Donald Pate, showed a population eating a genuinely broad diet: fruits, grains, domesticated animals, and seafood, among other categories (Pate 2016). Compared to paleodiets from Danish farmers and coastal Greek populations, Pompeiians ate a notably higher proportion of marine protein. Some researchers suspect this ties back to garum, a fermented fish sauce that Pompeiians spread on bread and referenced often in the literature of the time (Curtis 1983).

The study utilizes bone samples from both men and women, and their diets looked largely similar overall. One difference did emerge, though. It seems men ate somewhat more seafood and showed slightly more dietary variety than women, a pattern that researchers think may point to subtle social hierarchies between the two groups (Pate 2016).

In many ways, this analysis of the Pompeian diet solidifies past insights on Roman culture. The coastal city of Pompeii in the rich Roman Empire, unsurprisingly, had access to a lot of fish and diverse foods. While it’s easy to begin picturing this single “Roman diet”, it’s worth remembering that small dietary differences can reflect social nuances we don’t yet fully understand. I’ll always find it remarkable that a chemical signature locked in bone for two millennia can still tell us something this specific, and this human, about how people actually lived.

References:

1. Curtis, R. I. (1983). In defense of garum. The Classical Journal, 78(3), 232-240.
2. Minagawa, M. (1992). Reconstruction of human diet from σ13C and σ15N in contemporary Japanese hair: a stochastic method for estimating multi-source contribution by double isotopic tracers. Applied geochemistry, 7(2), 145-158.
3. Nardoto, G. B., Silva, S., Kendall, C., Ehleringer, J. R., Chesson, L. A., Ferraz, E. S., … & Martinelli, L. A. (2006). Geographical patterns of human diet derived from stable‐isotope analysis of fingernails. American Journal of Physical Anthropology: The Official Publication of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, 131(1), 137-146.
4. Pate, F. D. (2016). Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope evidence for dietary variability at ancient Pompeii, Italy. Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, 16(1), 127-127.
5. Schwarcz, H. P., & Schoeninger, M. J. (2011). Stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen as tracers for paleo-diet reconstruction. In Handbook of Environmental Isotope Geochemistry: Vol I (pp. 725-742). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
6. Urton, E. J., & Hobson, K. A. (2005). Intrapopulation variation in gray wolf isotope (δ15N and δ13C) profiles: implications for the ecology of individuals. Oecologia, 145(2), 316-325.
7. White, C. D., & Schwarcz, H. P. (1989). Ancient Maya diet: as inferred from isotopic and elemental analysis of human bone. Journal of Archaeological Science, 16(5), 451-474.