Pompeii: New Studies Reveal Secrets From a Dead City
August 2, 2016 - The ancient Roman town of Pompeii is one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites. Its exquisite villas, buried by volcanic ash in A.D. 79, have been the subject of study since the 18th century. But even today scientists continue to learn from the site. Modern imaging and chemical analysis of the human remains are adding depth to the picture of how Pompeii’s inhabitants lived.
READ:
Bringing the Ghostly City of Pompeii Back to Life
POMPEII, ITALY
MASSIMO OSANNA
ARCHAEOLOGIST AND DIRECTOR,
SOPRINTENDENZA POMPEI
Pompeii was, in that moment, 79 A.D, was really I can't say "the place to be", but was really an important, important town. Little, but important town.
PIER PAOLO PETRONE
ANTHROPOLOGIST
UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES FEDERICO II
Inside the casts there are the skeletons of these people so these are just human beings. [A] dead population living 2,000 years ago. So the body stayed just complete for 30-40 years, and slowly the sub-tissues disappeared but the ash bed made a kind of negative cast around the bodies.
So in the 1880s when [Giuseppe] Fiorelli had the very clever idea to put just plaster in the hollow cavities, he [was able to make] plaster casts.
MASSIMO OSANNA
ARCHAEOLOGIST AND DIRECTOR,
SOPRINTENDENZA POMPEI
The analysis with the plaster casts gives us a lot of data, about, for example, how they used to eat.
In the teeth of the victims you can see, for example, you can read the biography of the victims, so how they eat and so if they were, if they belong to the elite of the site or if they were just slaves.
We have a laboratory where we show all the fruit, bread, all the material carbonized, organic material carbonized by the eruption, by the eruption, and so we can see really how they used to live in the daily life in the day of the 79 A.D.
PIER PAOLO PETRONE
ANTHROPOLOGIST
UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES FEDERICO II
The sites buried by the 79 A.D. eruption of Vesuvius are very important to us because they are a unique example of the sudden catastrophe which buried suddenly entire cities, towns, people, objects, everything.
So actually the people from Pompeii, the people from Herculaneum, are just a kind of living [representation] of the population.
Because mostly anthropologists, archaeologists, they study dead people from cemeteries, but in this case these people were just alive so they were a living population.
This is very important to understand how they were living, the health of these people, illness, everything. Also about life, but also death.
At the moment we are trying to understand in detail how the people died in Pompeii and in Herculaneum.
We know, because we have studied in detail, that the people died due to the very high temperature, but we don't know exactly the mechanism.
Which is very important because Vesuvius is a very dangerous volcano, active volcano, explosive volcano.
So all this kind of data about how the people died 2,000 years ago. (But even 4,000 years ago there was a very large eruption of Vesuvius.) It's very important for civil protection, for future prevention of future eruptions at Vesuvius.
