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Pompeii: The City That Died in Seventeen MinutesEpisode 72:22

The Bodies the Ash Erased

Pompeii’s victims disappear underground, but the hardened deposits preserve the spaces their bodies occupied.

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Transcript

  1. The bodies vanished, but the ash kept their exact shapes. Under Pompeii, human absence became the most disturbing evidence.

  2. Pompeii stood near Mount Somma-Vesuvius, above the Sarno river. Its roads and port connected the coast with fertile inland farmland.

  3. In 79, Somma-Vesuvius buried nearby Roman towns and destroyed Pompeii.

  4. The explosive phase began around noon on October 24th.

  5. Eruption column reached about 82,000 feet, or 25 km.

  6. Pumice and ash reached 10 feet, or 3 meters, crushing several house roofs.

  7. The city became a sealed trap of falling stone and dust.

  8. Pyroclastic density currents: ground-hugging gas-particle flows from eruption-column or lava-dome collapse.

  9. At Pompeii, the current lasted 17 minutes, making ash lethal to breathe.

  10. The deposits covered buildings, streets, artifacts, and people. Ash compacted around bodies while soft tissue later decayed away.

  11. Pompeii was largely forgotten till rediscovered in the late 1700s. The image shows the site beneath a layer of amber ash.

  12. Pompeii excavations began in 1748, finding victims in houses and squares.

  13. Victims appeared in houses, squares, gardens, and streets beyond walls.

  14. More than 1,000 human victims have since been found among Pompeii's ruins.

  15. The excavators were not lifting bodies from the ash. They were tracing the spaces those bodies had occupied.

  16. Giuseppe Fiorelli developed liquid plaster for cavities from decayed soft tissue.

  17. Liquid plaster could preserve the body's shape after the body was gone.

  18. In 2015, CT scans or X-rays examined 26 casts.

  19. None of the 26 casts examined contained complete skeletons.

  20. The first cast startled Fiorelli when removed from hardened volcanic ash.

  21. Heavily manipulated casts were likely creatively restored.

  22. Restorers' aesthetic choices shaped popular views of Pompeii's victims.

  23. What happens when the most human evidence is an empty space?

Where it leaves off

In one body-shaped void, Giuseppe Fiorelli would make a radical choice: fill absence with liquid plaster.

Next: Episode 8, The Void That Became a Body

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