I once heard that when John Glenn visited the museum at Pompeii, he made a suggestion about the plaster casts made of the victims of the eruption.
In case you don’t know it, Pompeii was buried in soft volcanic ash (not to mention a rain of heavier ash and lava bombs, not to mention pyrocastic flow, but the ash is the important part here). It coated every part of the people killed, filing in around their bodies and clothes. It hardened into a cement-like cocoon, and when the bodies within decayed, it left a perfect mold of the bodies that had once been within. When they discovered these voids in the 19th century, someone hit on the idea of filling them with plaster of Paris. When the hardened ash was removed, they were left with perfect casts of the bodies, very accurate and frequently poignant. A dog was thus preserved, and children.*
Glenn saw some of these casts in the museum, and suggested that, if any new ones were found, they could fill the voids instead with transparent plastic. This would make the bones , jewelry, and remaining clothing visible. When I first heard about this, I thought it was a clever idea, but too late. How would we ever see the stuff inside those plaster forms now, unless we broke them open?
Well, now they can see them. A recent effort has been performing CAT scans on those plaster bodies, revealing at last what was within:
Some interesting things have already been learned:
I saw some of these casts when I visited Pompeii, and at exhibits about Pompeii that came to local museums back in 1979 (1900 years after the eruption!) and again just a few years ago. I didn’t realize there were over 100 of them.
*These plaster bodies also inspired one of the whackiest horror movies of the 1950s. In a weird twist on the re-animated Mummy concept, The Curse of the Faceless Man featured a survivor of Pompeii – obviously inspired by these plaster models, although in the movie he simnply emerges from the pumice of Pompeii without having anyone pour plaster into his “mold” – who comes back to life. As in John Balderston’s script for The Mummy, he goes in search of the Reincarnation of his Lost Love. Alas, when he walks into the sea with her, he – like the Wicked Witch of the West and the Triffids in the 1960s movie – dissolves. What a world! The script was by Jerome Bixby, who wrote It! The Terror from Beyond Space and the story It’s a GOOD life, which was turned into a memorable Twilight Zone episode. His films from the 1950-s are undeservedly forgotten – except in this case it’s deserved.
Pompeii and the science it makes possible has always interested me. With new tech, that science could seriously expand. Makes you wonder what could be next?
I saw a documentary on TV where they said that most Pompeians had their skull exploded from the inside because of the heat from the pyroclastic flow. Boiled their brains until their skulls popped.
One of the finds near Pompeii, in the town of Herculanum, is a library with over 1800 scrolls. They are completely carbonized, and yet they were also encased in ash in a way that preserved them. There has been some success unrolling and reading a few, but most are far too fragile.
Now, using really high resolution CT scans and image processing techniques, there has been some intriguing successes in reading from the still-rolled-up carbonized scrolls. So far the research team has only been able to pick out a few letters and words, but the technique has a lot of room for improvement.
That must be the most frustrating thing in the world… “Well, we can ALMOST read these scrolls, but we’ll have to wait a decade or two until the technology is up to it. And then we’ll have to find the funding.”
Heh. I imagine it’s a patient field. Other archaeologists are used to waiting for years while their grad students excavate a site with toothpicks to get a few fragments of pottery.
I was in Pompeii and Herculaneum last July. It was tremendously impressive and very sobering. Walking through the streets that, even though in ruins, still “feel” as if they had been full of the hustle and bustle of the city just the day before. The kitchens in the many eateries, the fuller’s shop, the “Europa house” with a ship sketched on one of the walls…
The “Garden of the Fugitives” in Pompeii (photo here) is saddening. A big group of people running away from the city had just reached a garden very close to the seashore (which these days is rather far from there; the successive eruptions from Vesuvius in the last 2000 years deposited enough material to push back the sea quite a bit), and were overwhelmed by a pyroclastic flow, dropping dead where they were. Their remains were found and casts were made. They were left exactly where they died in the attitudes in which they died; protected from the elements by a box of metacrilate, they remain as a mute testimony to the horror of that day.
Herculaneum is much better preserved than Pompeii, although the visitable area is much smaller (most of Herculaneum is right under the modern city; further excavation is almost impossible). Some of the best preserved Roman mosaics I have ever seen were there. Another impressive thing that hits you hard is the tavern sign “ad Cucumas”, with the list of prices for the wine sold there (the color of each jar indicated the type and quality of the wine being advertised - helpful for illiterates). It is direct evidence that this was a living, breathing city, full of people living their lives until Vesuvius wiped them off the face of the Earth. In the 1980s-1990s the remains of at least 300 persons were found in what were the boat houses next to the sea, which were buried under 50 feet of volcanic debris. Unlike Pompeii, where the soft ash allowed the bodies to leave castable imprints, Herculaneum was buried by a succession of pyroclastic flows followed by lahars and lava flows. The flesh from the victims was literally burned off the bones, leaving behind a tangle of skeletons, with only some jewelry remaining (as in the so-called “ring lady”, pictured here).
The visit I made to Pompeii and Herculaneum was borderline overwhelming. You feel transported back in time. Take the other visitors and tourists off from your mind, and you can almost feel like an ancient Roman walking those streets, stepping on the raised crossing stones, entering old shops and ancient homes, seeing political graffiti on the walls…
It was a powerful, sobering experience - and in my opinion extremely worthwhile. I have tried to somehow share it with you.
