There’s a scene in my archaeological mystery/romance The Five-Day-Dig where the excavation team comes across nails, hinges, locks and braces scattered on a floor among the ruins. “That’s what’s left of furniture after the wood decomposes,” one of the characters explains. “These fittings were parts of chests, cabinets or shelves.” In Pompeii, most wooden items decomposed centuries ago, but there are some cases of 2,000-year-old wood surviving in the ancient town and in nearby Herculaneum, which was buried in the same eruption.
The bedside table you see here is not from Ikea (har!) — it’s from Herculaneum. Wandering through the small fraction of the town that has been excavated, you can see plenty of wooden beams, window and door frames, railings, bed frames and the large folding wooden screen that gave the House of the Wooden Partition its name. For more pics of ancient Roman wooden furniture, see this very cool blog post from Bensozia.
Pompeii doesn’t seem to have as much surviving wood as Herculaneum, but archaeologists have made plaster casts (like the plaster body casts you’ve probably seen) of some of the decomposed wooden items. When Hubby and I went, we saw casts of wooden doors and shutters, but we missed the casts of furniture in the House of Julius Polybius. Something to check out next time — because we totally need another trip to Pompeii. 
