In late October 79 AD, Pompeii was swept away by lava. Mount Vesuvius, a massive active volcano just 8 kilometers from the thriving resort, has finally made the threats it has posed for fifteen years a reality and erupted, filling the nearby area with a deadly cloud of superheated gas, molten rock and hot ash.
Today, Pompeii stands out as a huge touristic archeology center that attracts approximately 2.5 million visitors to the ancient city every year. One of the most attractive features of this region are the famous “stone” bodies of poor people who were caught too unprepared to escape their grisly fate when the volcano erupted.
However, contrary to popular belief, these famous bodies are not actually petrified human bodies. While the image of hot, molten rock driving the inhabitants of the old city to their deaths, then cooling and turning their victims into timeless stone copies of themselves, is undoubtedly a chilling image, the reality is somewhat different, and even if you had visited the archaeological site before the 1800s, you wouldn’t have seen those bodies.
“The truth is that they are not actually human bodies,” said Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, in a 2012 article for BBC Magazine.
Stone bodies of Pompeii, not real human bodies
Excavations at Pompeii date back to the late 16th century, but the Pompeii we know today began to take shape in a later period under the direction of archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli. As these 19th-century diggers made their way through the layers of rubble and ash that covered the area, they began to notice something strange: In some places there were distinct pits and cavities containing human remains.
In fact, it wasn’t the ashy models we’re used to seeing today, but the real “bodies” of the citizens of Pompeii, the cavities once the shape of a poor victim kept the lava open long enough to cool around their corpses.
“Material from the volcano covered the bodies of the dead, forming a hard and solid structure around them,” Beard wrote. . With a brilliant idea, it didn’t take long to figure out that when you pour a plaster of Paris into that space, you’ll end up with a plaster model that’s exactly the same as the body. But they are just a replica – an ‘anti-body’ rather than a real body.”
University of Naples anthropologist Pier Paolo Petrone said in a 2017 interview with History and Archeology Online that the methods used in modern excavations have been slightly updated: “Today we are better able to use X-ray techniques such as 3D-CT scanning to probe the human content of plaster casts.”
But for the most part, new castings are made in a way that’s almost identical to the first set in the 1860s, Petrone says. While a clear epoxy resin can rarely be used instead of plaster, the traditional mix “remains best for making perfect replicas of the victim’s bodies,” he says.
In short, the petrified bodies that are Pompeii’s most famous attraction today are not actually the real inhabitants of the city. In fact, they are not such an exceptional object today. Because the technique used to create these figures is reusable, we can “clone” each body as many times as we want.
In addition, many of these models (and the excavation site itself) were severely damaged, particularly due to external influences such as World War II, when the area was the target of more than 160 bombs. “Parts of what we’re seeing now is a re-creation of re-creation,” Beard says. “I’m not accusing anyone of forgery. I mean, our Pompeii – like most classical sites indeed – is a product of a collaboration between modern rebuilders and conservators and the original Roman builders, and most of the work is on our side.”
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