Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time

Pompeii is one of the most iconic monuments of the Roman world.

Millions of tourists come here every year to see

the remains of this ancient city destroyed by the volcano Vesuvius.

I'm Margaret Mountford.

I've always been fascinated by ancient history,

and it doesn't get much better than this.

What makes Pompeii so special are these remarkable relics.

They're not statues.

'These are the remains of people frozen in the last

'few seconds of their lives.'

This is like looking at people who are asleep.

'Nothing like them has ever been seen anywhere else.

'They are unique.'

That almost looks like the way a boxer defends himself, doesn't it?

Everything here is so well preserved, we know almost

every detail of what happened on those days in August 79 AD.

The earthquakes.

The massive eruption.

The hail of ash, rock and pumice.

We even know the stories of many of the people who perished.

But why they are fixed in these extraordinary positions

had been a mystery for centuries.

Now it seems that vital clues had been overlooked.

'Using new technology...'

Oh, that's really the person. That's phenomenal.

'..and state-of-the-art experiments...'

Wow, nobody would have survived that, would they?

'..we are going to find out once and for all why these people are

'caught in these strange positions.'

That's a beautiful image. Look at that.

Eyes like a portrait.

And, for the first time ever, we are going to do something extraordinary.

We are going to bring you face to face with the two people

who died here 2,000 years ago.

That's amazing. That's just amazing.

Pompeii, southern Italy.

Over the last 265 years, this fascinating city has slowly

been excavated from beneath six metres of volcanic ash.

Archaeologists have rediscovered a world frozen in time

nearly 2,000 years ago.

But this city's last great secret is yet to be revealed.

How exactly did its population die

and why were their bodies so beautifully preserved?

This is my first visit to Pompeii, and showing me round the casts

is Paul Roberts.

He's head of the Roman Collections at the British Museum.

The first stop in my investigations is close to the walls of the city.

Beneath what is thought to have been a livery stable

are the remains of three people.

These are the first casts I've seen,

and I was expecting to see something like white marble statues.

This is like looking at people who are asleep.

The amazing thing is, inside those plaster casts are real people

who were walking around in Pompeii, then running for their lives,

and then died here.

And we don't have casts like this from anywhere else, do we?

Pompeii is unique in that respect, in preserving the imprints,

the casts of the real people.

The figure in the centre is the largest man ever found in Pompeii.

He has a far bigger build than the average Roman.

This has led people to believe he may have been a gladiator

brought here from Africa.

Most gladiators were slaves,

criminals or prisoners of war who were forced to fight for a living.

On either side of this giant are two other figures.

An adult male...

..and what is thought to be a young boy.

These two casts were found together, and many people believe

they are the remains of a father and his son.

One story goes that the family ran the livery stable

outside the city gates.

They would unload the carts that came in from the surrounding

countryside and then distribute the fresh produce around the city.

Life for children in Pompeii was hard.

They were forced to work alongside their parents,

as only the offspring of the wealthy went to school.

One day, this young boy may have taken over his father's job.

But this was not to be.

I find it quite difficult to know actually how

I should be reacting to them, because I do find it strange that

we're standing here looking at these bodies.

It is a very strange sensation to look at them, but I think if we try

and look through them, to imagine looking through their eyes

and to see them as real people, then that's not disrespectful at all.

That actually gives them back a bit of the life that they once had.

I've visited lots of Roman sites,

but I've never seen plaster casts of human bodies

like the ones they have here.

Normally the archaeologists find bones lying in mud or under rocks,

but here the bodies left behind these strange casts,

and I want to find what was different here

and why those casts were left behind.

To find out exactly what did happen here nearly 2,000 years ago,

and to discover why whole bodies were preserved,

we need to travel back in time to the day of the eruption.

On the morning of August 24th, 79 AD, just before midday,

a powerful earthquake rocked the quiet countryside

around the mountain.

LOUD RUMBLES

Then, at around one o'clock, Vesuvius erupted.

A giant plug of dirt and rock which had blocked the mouth of the volcano

was hurled into the air.

A huge cloud of ash and dust formed high above the volcano.

The cloud was pushed nearly 14 kilometres into the atmosphere,

forced up by a powerful column of gas and debris.

The cloud spread across the sky like black ink.

It was so dense, it blocked out the sun

and turned the sky above Pompeii to night.

And then, came the downpour.

Only this wasn't rain.

It was a barrage of fine ash,

rock and lumps of solidified lava known as pumice stone.

DOG WHINES

In less than an hour,

the eruption column had grown to almost 32 kilometres high.

Every second, one-and-a-half million tonnes of debris was pushed

high into the stratosphere.

And then fell back down on to the beleaguered city below.

LOUD RUMBLING

Pompeii was buried under a blanket of volcanic ash.

As panic ensued, people tried to escape.

But far worse was to come.

Today, Pompeii is unlike any other Roman ruin.

This is a city frozen in time.

It offers us an unrivalled insight into life in the ancient world.

But it also lets us

see the very people who once walked these cobbled streets.

These remains are not just exhibits in a museum.

They are loaded with clues which can help forensic scientists

discover how these people actually died.

One thing is certain, it wasn't lava.

At temperatures up to 1,200 degrees,

molten lava leaves little or no human remains.

So if the culprit wasn't lava, what else could it have been?

And why are the bodies of the dead in such strange positions?

This one is sitting with his hands covering his face.

This one is pushing himself up off the ground.

And this one seems to have just fallen asleep.

It's as if time stopped and the people froze.

PEOPLE SCREAM

For decades, it was thought that the ash that fell like rain

on the city of Pompeii was also responsible for killing its people.

With the air thick with ash and debris,

it was assumed that the people suffocated.

And the main reason for that

is down to one of the most famous casts in Pompeii.

This man's remains were found near the body of a mule,

and so he's been named the Muleteer.

Muleteers held one of the lowest social positions,

but they were vital for transporting goods around the city.

They knew the narrow streets of Pompeii better than anybody.

But this knowledge didn't help him escape on the day of the eruption.

His remains now sit in Pompeii's granary.

This crouching figure, his hands raised to his face,

was taken as proof the people of Pompeii were

suffocated by the ash raining down from Vesuvius.

'But Dr Peter Baxter from Cambridge University thinks

'the Muleteer's pose has been misinterpreted.'

Peter, this is one of the most famous casts here, isn't it?

People used to think that this position showed that

this individual had choked to death or been asphyxiated by ash.

What does the posture tell us?

Well, when the early archaeologists saw this cast,

they automatically jumped to the conclusion that the victim's died

as a result of the heavy ash fall from the volcano,

and that they very quickly got covered and buried in ash

and suffocated in the ash fall.

So the hands were protecting the nose?

The hands were, in effect, protecting the mouth from breathing

in the ash coming down in the air around them.

So people used to think that this individual had asphyxiated,

had choked to death.

Is this the kind of posture someone would have if that happened to them?

It's unlikely.

They're more likely to be unconscious on the ground,

rather than crouching like this.

So if the people here didn't suffocate on the ash,

and weren't consumed by lava, what did kill them

and fix their bodies in these strange positions?

To solve this mystery, scientists had to look beyond Pompeii

to another town that was also destroyed by the volcano Vesuvius.

Six kilometres from the volcano sits Herculaneum.

Until the 18th century,

this town lay hidden under 20 metres of volcanic debris.

It was only rediscovered

when a farmer digging a well on his property

struck the remains of a marble building.

Herculaneum was much smaller than Pompeii.

Home to around 5,000 people.

But its population was far wealthier.

Herculaneum was once an exclusive holiday resort,

where Rome's rich and powerful relaxed in absolute comfort,

their needs catered to by an army of slaves.

But all that wealth and influence couldn't protect them

from the disaster that was about to unfold.

Herculaneum is much closer to Vesuvius than Pompeii is,

so the people felt the force of the earthquake and eruption

far more strongly.

SCREAMING

They must have watched in horror

as a vast cloud of debris shot into the air...

..and then run for their lives.

When excavators first began to uncover Herculaneum,

they were surprised by how few human remains were found

compared to the many hundreds uncovered in Pompeii.

They assumed that the population had escaped,

but then, in the 1980s,

archaeologists turned their attention to a series of boat sheds

that once lined the beach.

Dr Pier Paolo Petrone is an anthropologist

who excavated three of these boat sheds.

Here are the victims.

Gosh, that's horrific.

So how many people were found in here?

So they'd run here to escape?

The people thought the boat sheds would keep them safe.

But instead, they became their tombs.

And what first struck you about these bones?

-And it looks as if it's been cut, it's so sharp.

-Yes.

The brains had burst out of the skull?

These skeletons look very different from the body casts in Pompeii.

It seems that whatever happened here

was the result of a force so hot it reduced these poor people

to a scorched pile of bones.

And yet, just like Pompeii,

lava was never found in Herculaneum.

So why did the same eruption reduce people to skeletons in one place,

and yet preserve whole bodies just a few kilometres away?

'I want to take a closer look at the volcano

'at the heart of this catastrophe - Vesuvius.'

This is the top of Vesuvius.

It's very hard, looking around here,

to think that this mountain caused all that damage.

But this sleeping giant wasn't always so peaceful.

When this volcano erupted nearly 2,000 years ago,

it did so in a way that had never been recorded before.

Instead of throwing out lava,

it somehow created a wave of intense heat that was strong enough

to kill people 11 kilometres away.

So what did happen here? And why was this eruption so different?

Although much of the evidence has been lost in the mists of time,

there was a witness to the disaster.

'A Roman whom we call Pliny the Younger

'was staying across the Bay of Naples from Vesuvius

'when it erupted.'

He wrote down what he saw,

and, 2,000 years later,

his words still hold clues to the events of that day.

12 hours after the initial eruption,

Vesuvius was still spewing millions of tonnes of ash

and debris into the atmosphere.

Pliny then described something very unusual.

He wrote that a great mass of material broke away

from the eruption column and flowed down the sides of the volcano.

The fast-moving avalanche of gas and dust spread out across the land

and covered everything in its path.

Pliny's words were disregarded for centuries,

thought to be the product of an overactive imagination.

But then, in the 1980s, a volcano erupted in North America

and people saw for themselves that Pliny hadn't been exaggerating.

Mount St Helens National Park has some of the most breathtaking scenery in the USA.

But on Sunday, May 18th, 1980,

this peaceful world was transformed

when the Mount St Helens volcano erupted.

For nine hours, a vertical eruption column over 24 kilometres high

spread half a billion tonnes of ash and debris across three states.

When it fell to Earth,

it covered everything within 600 kilometres in a fine ash.

Vulcanologists had seen eruptions before,

but this was the first time they had managed to capture on film

the spectacular phenomenon.

If you look at the footage carefully,

you can see that the whole north face of Mount St Helens collapses.

As it does, it releases a searing hot avalanche of gas and dust

that explodes down the sides of the mountain.

This is called a pyroclastic current.

Temperatures inside this tidal wave of gas and debris

measured 700 degrees Celsius.

The turbulent wave of superheated gas

travelled at nearly 130 kilometres an hour.

It destroyed everything in its path within seconds.

You can see the devastation caused by the pyroclastic current

over ten kilometres from the mouth of the volcano.

Brittany Brand is a vulcanologist

who has made an in-depth study of the explosive eruption.

She thinks that what happened in North America

holds vital clues to what happened here in Italy nearly 2,000 years ago.

Could you explain what a pyroclastic current is?

A pyroclastic current is an avalanche of searing hot gas, ash and rock

that travels down the slopes of a volcano

at hundreds of kilometres an hour.

It's impossible to outrun and absolutely deadly.

When I think of an eruption,

I think of streams of lava coming down a mountain.

Well, the style of eruption,

whether a volcano will erupt lava

or if it were to erupt explosively,

is primarily a function of how much gas is in the magma.

If there is no gas in the magma,

then the magma will erupt as a lava flow or a lava dome.

And that is the actual magma, the liquefied rock that's coming out?

Exactly.

And in an explosive eruption, the difference is the magma

has gas bubbles, and as the gas in the magma makes its way

to the surface, the gas bubbles get bigger and bigger and bigger,

to the point where, when the volcano erupts,

the gases just expand very quickly,

and it rips the magma apart into very tiny pieces,

-which are your ash and your pumice.

-I see.

So it's still the same...

-The pumice and the tiny rocks are still the stuff that would be lava.

-Yeah.

-It's just the gas has split them up.

-Exactly.

The pumice, the ash, they're all bits and pieces of the magma.

If there is no gas, it would erupt as a lava flow,

but because there is gas, it was pulverised in an explosive eruption.

From what scientists witnessed at Mount St Helens,

and data gathered from other volcanic eruptions,

it's now possible to piece together

exactly what happened when Vesuvius erupted.

12 hours after the initial eruption,

Vesuvius was still forcing millions of tonnes of volcanic debris into the air.

Both Pompeii and Herculaneum were drowning

under a thick blanket of ash and pumice.

The people in Herculaneum took refuge in the boat sheds.

But the ash fall was nothing compared to what was to come.

The eruption column stretched nearly 32 kilometres high.

Under its own weight, it was beginning to weaken.

And at around 2am, part of the column collapsed.

The collapsing column sent a pyroclastic current

surging down the sides of the volcano...

A turbulent avalanche of superheated gas and dust

travelling at hurricane speeds.

Temperatures inside the explosive blast were over 500 degrees Celsius.

The wave of searing hot gas and ash

took less than five minutes to strike Herculaneum.

The people sheltering in the boat sheds had no idea

what was about to happen.

The intense heat surge killed them instantly.

It vaporised their flesh,

and the pressure from inside caused their skulls to burst open.

And that is why all that remained of the people in the boat sheds

were blackened skeletons and cracked skulls.

The people in Pompeii were unaware of the horror

raked on their neighbours because the pyroclastic current

ran out of energy before reaching the city walls.

For the moment, it seemed that they were safe.

But they would not escape.

They would be left not as bones,

but as bodies captured in their final moments.

Remarkably, despite years of research,

there are still clues in Pompeii that were overlooked.

This is the Macellum.

It was once Pompeii's bustling marketplace,

a lively and sometimes smelly focal point

for the city's 20,000 inhabitants.

It's now the final resting place of two people killed by Vesuvius.

For years, people thought that this woman had her arms raised

because she was trying to protect herself against an attacker.

But recently forensic scientists have reanalysed her strange posture,

and they now think it holds vital information

about how the people in Pompeii died.

Peter, does this cast give us any clues

as to how this person died?

Yes. This attitude is very typical of someone who has been exposed

to extreme heat at the moment of death.

It appears as if the individual is protecting themselves

while lifting their arms up in that way,

but it is also very characteristic of the effects of intense heat,

when they are enveloped in the cloud of very hot ash and gases.

That almost looks like the way a boxer defends himself, doesn't it?

Yes, it's called the pugilistic attitude by pathologists,

because when people are caught and die in fires,

they can adopt this posture, causing the muscles

to coagulate and shorten

so that the limbs flex and adopt this shape,

and then this posture becomes fixed at the time of death.

It's very hard to overcome.

So this isn't just characteristic of death from a volcanic eruption,

it's death from heat?

We see this whenever anyone dies from extreme heat.

So if this person did die from exposure to intense heat,

there must have been more than one pyroclastic current.

And one of them must have reached the city of Pompeii.

But why are the remains in Pompeii

so different from the remains at Herculaneum?

The reason is simply down to distance.

Pompeii is five kilometres further from Vesuvius than Herculaneum is.

So as the wave of heat travelled the extra kilometres,

it cooled from 500 degrees to around 300 degrees.

This was still hot enough to kill the people instantly,

but not hot enough to vaporise their flesh.

But this theory raises another question.

If you look closely at the casts in Pompeii,

you can still see the imprint of the clothes

that people were wearing on the day they died.

So if the people were struck by a wave of gas over 300 degrees Celsius,

why wasn't their clothing destroyed?

To find out, I've come to Edinburgh.

Here at the university they have a machine

that is capable of recreating a pyroclastic current in the laboratory.

Helping us is fire safety engineer Dr Luke Bisby.

Luke, you know we've got this puzzle at Pompeii,

because what seems to have happened is that the people were killed

by the heat. But their clothing has remained intact,

so we can still see the sandals, we can still see the clothes.

How can that have happened?

One of the reasons we're trying to run this test is to simulate

the conditions of what happened to try to understand

how it is that the temperature could have been sufficiently high

to effectively kill the people instantaneously,

and yet the clothing wasn't burned.

So, Luke, what does this machine do?

It's a piece of equipment called a fire propagation apparatus.

Basically, we place the sample inside this quartz tube on a table

down inside the machine,

and we use these very high-powered infrared lamps

to impose heat that we can supply to the sample in a very controlled way.

The sample fabric we are using is a type of boiled wool.

It's thought to be very similar to the type of material

worn by the population of Pompeii.

We're wrapping the wool around pieces of pork

to replicate the human flesh beneath the cloth.

So we are going to stimulate what it would have been like

-for a person being hit by that surge?

-That's right.

What we're trying to do here is simulate a pyroclastic surge

moving down the side of the volcano and over Pompeii at a velocity of about 40 miles an hour,

at a gas temperature of about 300 degrees Celsius.

OK, well, let's see what happens.

The light given off by this machine is powerful enough to blind,

so before it fires up I've got to put on safety glasses.

We're going to heat the sample for 150 seconds.

Experts think this is the length of time the people of Pompeii

were exposed to the pyroclastic current.

Right, so let's have a look inside our sample here.

The cloth is a bit charred, isn't it?

Yeah, there's some slight discolouration

and charring of the cloth,

but, as you can see, it's still very much intact.

These are predominantly edge effects due to contact with the foil.

In any case, it's really the centre that we're more interested in,

-and you can see the cloth there is very well intact.

-That's phenomenal.

And underneath, we have the pork flesh.

I'll just take it out of the foil here,

and you can see there is some slight discolouration

and drying to the top of the pork, so it's definitely been heated.

I'll just cut into it here

and see if we can see any discolouration.

There is some clear discolouration at the surface here,

although not to a very significant depth.

You can see that the pork at the top is actually cooked,

despite the fact that we don't have any damage to the woollen cloth.

So what temperature would the flesh have got to, to turn out like that?

-I expect the flesh here got to between 200-250 Celsius.

-Wow.

Nobody would have survived that, would they?

I think it's probably unlikely.

It used to be thought that the victims at Pompeii

must have suffocated, because if they'd been killed by heat

then their clothing would have been destroyed.

But this experiment has shown that a wave of heat at 300 degrees

will leave the clothing intact.

By bringing all the evidence together -

the charred and burned skeletons in Herculaneum,

evidence from Mount St Helens,

the contorted poses of the body cast in Pompeii,

and the result of the cloth test in Edinburgh -

it's now possible for the very first time to piece together

the unique sequence of events that played out

when Vesuvius erupted,

and to reveal exactly how the people in Pompeii died

and why their bodies were frozen in time.

At 1am on the second day of the eruption,

the people sheltering in Herculaneum had just seconds to live.

They were killed by the first pyroclastic current.

The people in Pompeii were oblivious to the death

and destruction because the first wave of superheated gas

ran out of energy far from the city walls.

But the eruption was far from over.

As time passed, the column continued to weaken.

At 2am, it collapsed again.

The second pyroclastic current thundered down the sides of the volcano,

closely followed by a third.

Each surge grew in strength and pushed further and further out,

closer and closer to the city of Pompeii.

At around dawn, the shower of ash and debris

falling onto Pompeii began to ease.

Many people who had fled the city

returned to collect their money and valuables,

thinking that the worst was over.

But this was a cruel deception.

At around 7.30am, the column above Vesuvius collapsed again.

A fourth pyroclastic current surged down the sides of the volcano.

The gas and debris raced over the ground.

This time, it did reach Pompeii.

So now we know the people of Pompeii didn't suffocate on the ash.

They weren't consumed by lava.

They were struck down by a wave of intense heat.

By the time the eruption was over,

Vesuvius had produced six pyroclastic currents.

Over time, the ash that covered the bodies hardened,

encasing each of the dead in a solid outer shell.

As the remaining flesh inside the shell decomposed,

it left behind a cavity,

a perfect mould of each victim's final position.

And this allowed archaeologists to do something extraordinary.

When they pumped plaster into the cavities,

they created these fascinating casts

unlike anything that has been seen before or since.

The ash that covered the dead was so fine,

it preserved details of their faces and the clothes they wore,

and, 2,000 years later,

it has provided us with the clues to how the people died.

I wonder what it was like when the first human cast was produced.

It must have been pretty nerve-racking,

chipping away that rock to see what they would find,

but incredibly exciting when the whole human shape appeared.

These casts are the real treasures of Pompeii.

They're closely guarded and incredibly fragile,

but, for the very first time,

the authorities have given permission to peer beneath the plaster.

Using state of the art digital X-ray technology,

we want to recreate the face of a person who died on that fateful day.

The cast we have chosen rests inside Pompeii's granary.

We want to X-ray this cast

because the plaster encasing the skull is extremely thin.

Although this is one of the first casts ever created,

very little is known about who this person once was.

We think it was a male, because of the large build.

But what he did for a living remains a mystery.

We call him The Anonymous Man, because we know so little about him.

But can we find out what he looked like?

To recreate this man's face, we've enlisted Richard Neave.

He's an expert on anatomical facial reconstruction.

Tell me, how do you work? What are you going to do?

Because of the limitations on how we can handle this material,

if we can get X-rays of the skull from the front and the side,

then from that information I can rebuild a skull.

-And you can actually then put flesh on the bones?

-Effectively, yes.

It's a wonderful challenge. It's not been done before.

-So are you excited at the idea of doing it?

-Oh, yes, I am indeed.

-It's all in the bone. It's all information in that skull.

-Mm-hm.

'Because the skull is encased in plaster,

'we need to use a digital X-ray machine to see through it.

'And as a safety precaution, we have to wear lead vests

'and cordon off the area from the public.

'Helping us is X-ray technician Steyn Loeke.'

OK, so we're going to do the left lateral...

'The handheld X-ray machine sends images directly to a monitor

'where Richard and I can view them.'

-Bingo!

-Look!

-Wow!

-Gosh!

-Ha-ha!

-I had no idea that there'd be a whole skull in there.

I find that amazing, actually.

Look at that. It's like a portrait.

I'm hoping that Steyn is going to be able to do some magic so that we

can actually see the angle of the jaw, which I think is just there,

-because it's a whopping great big square one.

-Yep.

-It's a very masculine sort of skull, that.

-Absolutely.

-Very strong.

-It never ceases to amaze me.

-That's the expert eye, I think.

'At first, the X-ray machine produces images that are grainy

'and difficult to read.

'But we soon start to get pictures that Richard can use.'

Oh, wow!

It's surprising, isn't it, when you look at it like this?

Just how much...you really can...see.

-That's the edge of the skull there.

-Yes. There's the front of the skull.

Beautifully shown. There's the frontal sinus here.

That's the roof of the orbit down there.

-The roof of the eye socket.

-Mm-hm.

There's the nose, the floor of the mouth, the palate. Hard palate.

And our teeth.

Upper and lower teeth.

So is this good enough to create a reconstruction from?

Well, with the other views, yes, we can...

From this, we can then create a skull.

And having done that, we can create the face and the skull we've made.

Well, we've spent nearly all day taking X-rays of casts.

It's much more difficult than I thought it would be,

but I think finally we've actually got somewhere.

We've got a series of X-rays Richard can work from. And that's great.

Two, three.

'It's incredible to think that something as destructive

'as a volcanic eruption could help preserve such fragile remains.

'The reconstruction team have also been given access to another

'victim of Vesuvius, this time from the town of Herculaneum.

'Even though the massive heat surge stripped the people of all

'traces of their identity, it is possible

'to recreate the face of one of these individuals because

'every skull holds detailed information about how a person looked.

'To reconstruct a face, we have been given unprecedented access to

'the skull of a young woman who died in one of the boat sheds.

'She's known as the Bella Donna.

'She's thought to have been a wealthy inhabitant of Herculaneum,

'a woman who lived a life of luxury and pleasure.

'A life cut all too short.'

I'm holding a 2,000-year-old skull.

This is supposed to be a woman's skull, and she's called Bella Donna,

the beautiful woman.

I wonder if we can tell that, or if you can tell that.

Now, we can see from this that it has the features that one would

associate with a female skull. You have big eye sockets, big orbits.

And it's very symmetrical,

and one tends to associate beauty with symmetry.

-With regular features.

-Regular features, yes.

-Well, I shall put this on here.

-Nicely in the centre.

OK, let's start this up.

'To recreate the Bella Donna's face,

'we first need to make a complete scan of her skull.

'This machine will map the skull in the most exquisite detail.

'And from this, we can print out an exact three-dimensional copy.'

So now you can see on the screen already, the 3D object.

-It's like a real object coming out of nothing.

-Exactly.

'Richard will then use the 3D copy as a foundation from which to

'build the face of this woman.'

I know this is the skull of someone who lived here 2,000 years ago,

and yet I find it very hard to relate that

and the fact that she died in the eruption of Vesuvius to a skull

that I'm holding in my hands now. It doesn't feel real to me.

'My time in Pompeii is now coming to an end

'and it's been a fascinating experience.

'I'm hoping that Richard will be able to use his skill and knowledge

'to show us the faces of two people who died in this terrible tragedy.

'For the last two months,

'Richard Neave has been hard at work in his studio in England.

'Using measurements taken from the X-rays and 3D scans,

'he's built skulls for both the Bella Donna and the Anonymous Man.

'And he's now starting to put flesh on the bones.

'Slowly, layer upon layer of muscle and soft tissue is built up.

'Once the eyes are in place, the faces take shape.'

It's no longer just a blank skull staring at you.

This is going to be more and more familiar as time goes by.

'It's now winter, and Richard and I are back in Italy.

'Both the reconstructions are finished, and I'm looking forward to

'coming face to face with two people who lived here 2,000 years ago.

'The first is the Bella Donna.

'This young woman is thought to have been one of Herculaneum's wealthier citizens.

'She died cowering in one of the boat sheds.'

EXPLOSION

'We have brought her reconstruction to the town where

'she once lived, Herculaneum.'

-Right, so this is the Bella Donna.

-This is the Bella Donna.

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what you've made.

Yes, well, you've only seen a skull of her before.

So...this is what we've got.

It's a person. She's actually got character.

It's so real. That's all I can say. So real.

-To think of the skull...

-You were holding the skull, yes.

While I was holding the skull, I couldn't imagine a person,

and now I see her, I find it difficult to relate her face

to the skull, but that's because she's alive and the skull isn't.

No.

-She's called the Bella Donna.

-Yes.

-And I think she is beautiful.

-Whether she'd have been a showstopper...

-Difficult to know.

I suspect she could well have been in her day.

So do you think they'll still call her the Bella Donna?

I expect so, yes.

I certainly became quite attached to her, I have to say.

-She's not yours now, you know!

-She's not mine now, no, no. No.

I find it very hard

when looking at all those skeletons in the boathouses to think these

were all individuals, but looking at her and thinking her skull was

among those, she was an individual and of course, they all were.

It brings it much more to life, somehow, what happened.

'This young woman once walked along the narrow streets of Herculaneum.

'She may even have worshipped here in this temple.

'I think it's remarkable that Richard has been able to breathe

'life into something that was just a skull.

'The second face Richard has reconstructed is of the man

'who now lies in Pompeii's granary.

'We called this cast the Anonymous Man, as no clues as to who

'he was or what he did for a living were ever found on his body.

'But we do have some idea of how and when he died.

'We think this man managed to live through 12 hours of the eruption.

'He may have escaped the worst of the ash fall

'by hiding inside his home.

'At around dawn on August 25th, he tried to flee the city.

'But he didn't get far.'

EXPLOSION

'At around 7.30 in the morning,

'he was engulfed by the fourth pyroclastic current.

'It killed him instantly.

'We have brought his reconstruction to where his body cast now rests,

'Pompeii's granary.

'I wonder what face Richard has been able to put on this mysterious figure.'

-This is what I've been waiting for.

-Here we are.

-Right. Let's see what you've made.

There he is, Margaret.

That's amazing! That's just amazing!

-Not what you were expecting.

-Not what I was expecting at all.

And I think it...looks so real,

so human and...so much...what would be more lifelike, but so alive,

and thinking that that actually is what the person

whose bones are inside that plaster,

but it doesn't seem to me really like a real person,

whereas when I see what you've made here, the person comes alive.

You can imagine him living here and walking up and down these streets.

Here at Pompeii, archaeologists have concentrated on the buildings,

the artefacts, the wall paintings,

all those things left in the physical record, because we haven't

got them left anywhere else, but of course, it was a time for people,

and people lived here and these are the people who died here.

It's extraordinary looking into that man's eyes.

He seems so human, he's almost alive.

And he was just an ordinary man who lived here,

but he died in the most extraordinary way.

And looking at him, you wonder what can it have

been like for the people who were caught in that eruption?

It must have been indescribably awful.

I still think it's intrusive,

standing so close to these casts and looking at them.

But they are remarkable.

They don't just put a human face on the tragedy here,

they've helped to explain how the people actually died.

Pompeii has wonderful buildings, baths, theatres,

but what makes it special is the story of the people

and how their lives were brought to such a dramatic and horrific end.

Pompeii still sits in the shadow of the giant Vesuvius.

It's erupted over 50 times since this city was destroyed.

The last time, in 1944,

half a metre of ash fell on to its ancient streets.

Vesuvius is still alive.

Still smouldering.

And who knows what the future may bring?

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd