A plaster cast of a victim of the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, on display in Pompeii in March.Credit...Cesare Abbate/EPA, via Shutterstock
The New York Times has a story about the residents of Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E. Naratives were created when body cavities were first discovered at Pompeii in 1863. One group, a child and two adults were thought to be related, with a pair being a mother with a her child. DNA research from preserved bones has shed light into the true identities of the three individuals. A paper published in the journal Current Biology found the the adults were biologically unrelated with an unrelated boy.
Gabriele Scorrano, a University of Copenhagen geneticist who was not involved in the new study, said the findings confirmed and reinforced most of a preliminary analysis of the casts announced in 2017 as part of the Great Pompeii Project, an eight-year program to stabilize and repair the most endangered features of the site.
In that initiative, medical imaging debunked several myths about the casts. A CT scan of one known as the Pregnant Woman revealed that the person was probably not pregnant, and might not have been a woman. An array of specialists speculated that bunched-up clothing accounted for the bulge of the belly. They also determined that some of the victims had most likely died from head injuries rather than asphyxiation.
An estimated 10 percent of Pompeii’s 20,000 or so inhabitants perished when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The first systematic excavations began only in 1748 and proceeded slowly until 1860, when the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli was put in charge. It was Fiorelli who pioneered the technique for fashioning plaster casts. To date, 104 have been made.
