CNN —Children’s sketches of violent scenes of gladiators and hunters battling animals have been uncovered at the archaeological park of Pompeii, the park’s superintendent has said. The drawings, thought to be made by children between the ages of five and seven sometime before Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, were found on the walls of a back room in the “Island of chaste lovers” residential sector of the archaeological park. The drawings depict a fight scene with two gladiators, spears in hand, facing what is likely to have been intended to be wild boars. So far, they have determined that the drawings likely came from “direct vision” of an event rather than from pictorial models.

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Persons: ” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Department of Child Neuropsychiatry, Naples ’ Federico, ” Zuchtriegel Organizations: CNN, Department of Child, Naples ’, University Locations: Mt, “, Pompeii, Naples