Question regarding Pompeii’s living statues (I’d like a different word for but that seems to be the common term for the Pompeii victims encased in ash and plaster). My question is whether all of those on display are covered in plater cast or are some in their original ash-covered state when they were unearthed ?I’ve been trying to distinguish from pictures whether or not these bodies on display are all covered in plaster casts or whether some are in their original ash-covered state? By the way, when tephra/volcanic ash hardens on the body is it referred to as basal rock or simply hardened volcanic ash?
I was under the impression that those statues were casts made by pouring plaster into the shell left behind after the remains had deteriorated, and had been removed.
Yes. And sometimes skeletal remains can be seen through the plaster, where the bones shifted after casting. It always seemed a little weird that people would do this with the remains of people, but things like that seem not too out of place for archeologists. There are also skeletal remains stored and studied of people who sheltered on the coast. Those skeletons weren’t ash covered.
Your use of “petrified ash” leads me to think you may be confusing it with the kind of ash you get from a fire. Volcanic ash is fine stone spouted by an erupting volcano; it’s deposited and may be compacted but it was already stone to begin with.
As I understood, the people were covered in ash where they fell. The body eventually burned and decayed away, so essentially the volcanic ash made a mold; the body decays and/or burns and a hole is left. When archaeologists first realised this, they started filling the voids with plaster to see what the person was like, what they were doing. From what I’ve seen, these are by no means perfect and detailed, but very close. Once the plaster hardens, the ash is scraped away.
Within a few months or years of the eruption, people had already started excavating and tunneling in Pompeii - retrieving construction material like marble columns (already carved marble was expensive). Also, crooks or former owners who had a rough idea where the riches were kept began digging and tunneling to try to find what they could. IIRC, there are a few sites where people were found dead in cave-ins before the people who thought they knew where treasure would be found had died. Remember, this was in the days before chequing accounts, so a lot of houses would have kept their wealth in a strong box in the owner’s office room. I’m sure some people were known to have not taken all their wealth with them, or couldn’t carry it all, or died trying. The ash is not solid rock they way we think of molten lava flows, it’s more a combination gravel and dust that compacts and sort of sticks together - hence easy to tunnel through, and easy to remove from a plaster cast once the plaster has hardened. there are still areas today being slowly excavated.
I think David might just have been referring to the way the fine ash particles have become cemented together as rock capable of supporting itself when people-shaped voids form in it.
If you ever find yourself in the Naples area, go to Herculaneum where the buildings and other artefacts are much better preserved than those at Pompeii.
It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like with vast quantities of superheated ash falling on a small town. It was eventually buried 20 metres (66 feet) deep, which is why it was not looted as much as Pompeii.*"Unlike Pompeii, the deep pyroclastic material which covered it preserved wooden and other organic-based objects such as roofs, beds, doors, food and even some 300 skeletons which were discovered in recent years along the seashore. It had been thought until then that the town had been evacuated by the inhabitants.
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exposure to the surges, measuring at least 250 °C (482 °F) even at a distance of 10 kilometres from the vent, was sufficient to cause the instant death of all residents, even if they were sheltered within buildings"*
The residents of Herculaneum mostly escaped because they were not engulfed by the first eruption. However, many of them perished sheltering in buildings along what was then the beach.
I think I’m right in saying that the ash is composed of rocks overlying the eruption that are heated by the rising plume of magma - but is it typically sedimentary rock before it is turned into ash (i.e. technically metamorphic), or is the ash just finely divided aerated cooled lava?
When I toured Pompeii, I was told that astronaut John Glenn, seeing the plaster casts and learning that there were bones and jewelry inside those casts, suggested that they instead make future casts with modern clear plastic, so that they could see what was inside. as far as I know, they’ve never tried this.
Of course, today you can take CAT scans of the plaster and tell what’s inside those casts.
One of my favorite oddball facts is that one of those wonderful grade Z 1950s horror films that I love so much – The Curse of the Faceless Man, a perennial on New York WPIX’s Chiller Theater – concerns just such a figure that comes to life. Actually, in the movie it wasn’t a plaster cast, but something that looks remarkably like one of those plaster statues that digs its way out of the ground. It’s the reincarnation of Quintillus, a Roman Gladiator, and he pursues the woman who is the reincarnation of his lost love. It’s a low-budget “Mummy” movie, with a plot re-hashing Im-Ho-Tep’s and Kharis’ quests for the reincarnations of their lost loves in the Universal movies of the 1930s and 1940s. In the end, Quintillus carries his unconscious love into the sea, where he dissolves like a Wicked Witch or a Triffid.
Wiki indicates that true volcanic as is the latter – lava which becomes a fragile foam of stiffening lava. (The bubbles come from dissolved gas or water vapor flashing back into gas as the lava loses pressure). If bubbles constitute a majority percentage of the volume, the resulting mass breaks up into fine crystals and droplets of cooling rock – ash. (Which is why the air in a pyroclastic flow is so amazingly hot – all that lava dumped its heat content into the air at about the same time. It’s not just the red-hot ash powder.)
ignorance, at least this one…exterminated.