Context Behind the Discovery of Pompeii
On what is speculated to be the 24th of August during the year 79AD during the early morning Pompeii was in impending danger from the volcano Mt. Vesuvius that loomed over the city. During that fateful morning Mt Vesuvius erupted spewing out multiple surges of pyroclastic clouds of toxic gas and debris travelling at 100kph. The citizens that were in the city quickly burned from the inside and suffocated to death due to the immense heat that was produced reducing the city to no more than a memory. Once the eruptions had finished however a very fine ash settled and covered the city and thus preserved the bodies in a shell of ash leaving their bodies to rot and leave only a hollow body shape in the pumice stone.
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The city of Pompeii would remain forgotten for over 1500 years until the year 1549 when the Italian architect Domenico Fontana was tasked with digging out a water channel through Pompeii and happened to come across the still standing buried walls of Pompeii. This of course intrigued those in the archaeological field at the time and the site of Pompeii was studied. However the exploration of Pompeii at the time was destroying all of the evidence of life in the city; so to combat this Giuseppe Fiorelli the director of the Pompeii excavation from 1863 to 1875 decided to excavate from the top layer of ash moving down and noticed that the hollow chunks discovered in the pumice stone where actually the void that the victims left behind when they were frozen in time so to speak. So to uncover these bodies Giuseppe Fiorelli poured plaster into the voids and once dry would remove the stone surrounding to reveal the 3D image of a citizen that had died during the eruption perfectly capturing his last moments. This practice was performed with every other body found from then leading to a collection of 100 plus bodies discovered.
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