Pompeii has been inspiring stories for generations: for example and most recently Robert Harris’s Pompeii, a cracking thriller even if you already suspect what’s going to happen with that big pointy mountain to the north of the city. For the last couple of years, the first major excavation in decades has been going on there, and the city is still turning out ideas.

Chronicled in Pompeii: The New Dig, an occasional series available on BBC iPlayer, a team of archaeologists are working away at a previously untouched block of the city. In last year’s episodes, the archaeologists came to realise they were excavating a bakery. This then turned out to be just one of a number of businesses in the same block, owned by – or owned by a friend of – one wealthy man, probably called Aulus Rustius Verus. The businesses were all adjacent to the owner’s luxurious residence, which is what they started excavating in this year’s episode. The prize discovery has been his own private bath complex, complete with pipework. So even on that basis it is interesting to a writer, but there’s more.

Last year some skeletons were found in a small room. They had died when the roof collapsed under the weight of ash, before the final, lethal pyroclastic flow hit Pompeii. But there didn’t seem to be anyone else around, so, why had they not got out? Well, because they were probably slaves, locked in while everyone else fled. Nice, eh? No H&S in those days …

This year, in a different part of the complex they have found two more skeletons together in another room. One is an older woman, wealthy, which we know because she had jewellery on her, including earrings like those shown in a mosaic of an upper class man and woman that could well be Aulus and his wife. The room could very well be the strongroom where she kept her jewellery – she was found next to the remains of a lockable chest. The other is a younger male, aged 15-20, who from the wear on his bones was probably a slave.

If that is Mrs Aulus, was she the one who locked the slaves in? In which case it’s hard to feel sorry for her. Shame about the boy, though.

Was she packing her stuff before fleeing the villa? Did she pick the boy slave to carry the goods because he was young and strong, and leave the others to their fate? It would be interesting to do a DNA comparison between the boy and the other slave skeletons.

But, they, too, seem to have been locked in. How did that happen? Did he lock her in, threatening only to set her free if she freed the other slaves?

She was found lying on a bed; he was found also crushed under a collapsed wall. Did he lock them in, then get killed before he could free them; she then couldn’t get at the key under the weight of the masonry, and collapsed on the bed as the fumes overpowered her?

And people ask where writers get their ideas from.

Story ideas are generated when ideas bang together until creativity explodes in a chain reaction. But unless the chain reaction is carefully channelled by practice and experience then rather than a big bang you might just get a damp fizzle. We’ve all been there.

And if you have the exploding idea; well, we have the practice and experience, so let’s talk.