Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time - Learning Zone

The plaster casts of Pompeii.

They are some of the world's most famous echoes of our past.

In this programme, I discover that science can now reveal

exactly how these people died, and bring us face to face with history.

That's amazing. That's just amazing.

On the morning of what is thought to have been 24th of August, 79 AD,

a powerful earthquake rocked the quiet countryside

around mount Vesuvius.

LOUD RUMBLES

This was a sign that the volcano was stirring.

Then, at around 1 o'clock, Vesuvius erupted.

Mount Vesuvius erupted because the pressure exerted by the molten rock

beneath the earth's crust increased to such a point

it had to find a way out.

Within seconds of the eruption, a gigantic cloud of ash and dust formed high above the volcano.

The cloud was pushed more than 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

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

high into the stratosphere.

And then fell back down onto the beleaguered city of Pompeii below.

LOUD RUMBLING

Pompeii and the nearby town of Herculaneum were drowning in a thick blanket of ash and pumice.

The people sheltering in the boat sheds had no idea

what was about to happen.

12 hours after the eruption, the column of gas and debris

stretched 32 kilometres high.

But under its own weight, it was beginning to weaken.

And at around 2am part of the column collapsed.

The collapsing column sent a wave of superheated gas and dust

surging down the sides of the volcano.

This is known as a pyroclastic current.

Temperatures inside the explosive blast were over 500 degrees Celsius,

and travelled at 350 kilometres an hour.

As time passed, the column continued to weaken.

At 2am it collapsed again.

A 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, shower of ash

and debris falling on Pompeii began to ease.

The survivors in the city thought they were over the worst.

But this was a cruel deception.

Many people who'd fled returned to gather money and valuables.

At around 7:30 AM, the column above Vesuvius collapsed again.

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

This time, gas and debris raced over the ground at even higher speeds.

This time, it did reach Pompeii.

Herculaneum, which is five kilometres closer than Pompeii to Vesuvius,

had been hit by a pyroclastic current over five hours earlier,

with even more devastating effects.

Seven kilometres from Vesuvius sits Herculaneum.

Until the 18th century,

this town lay hidden beneath more than 20 metres of volcanic debris.

When excavators first began to uncover Herculaneum,

they were surprised by how few human remains were found.

The assumed 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.

And what first struck you about these bones?

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

-Yes.

So what force was hot enough to reduce these poor people

to a pile of scorched bones?

To understand what happened in Herculaneum,

we need to look at a volcano that erupted in North America in the 1980s.

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.

Vulcanologists had seen eruptions before,

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

a little-known 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.

The turbulent wave of gas measured 700 degrees Celsius

and travelled at nearly 500 kilometres an hour.

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.

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,

the column above Vesuvius stretched nearly 32 kilometres high.

But under its own weight, it collapsed.

A pyroclastic current surged down the sides of the volcano

at speeds up to 300 km an hour

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, seven kilometres away.

The intense heat surge killed them instantly.

It vaporised their flesh.

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

were blackened skeletons and cracked skulls.

Buried beneath hardened ash, the victims' bodies decomposed.

Centuries later, archaeologists filled the cavities left behind

with plaster to make these eerie casts.

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 that 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.'

Well, when the early archaeologists saw this cast,

they automatically jumped to the conclusion that the victims 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?

There is a clue hidden in the pose of a cast

which now lies in another part of Pompeii.

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 were killed.

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

by 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.

But a mystery remains.

If the victims of Pompeii were killed by intense heat,

how did their clothes, still visible on the casts, survive?

If you look closely at the plaster casts in Pompeii, you can

still see the imprint of the clothes that people were wearing

when Vesuvius erupted.

They, like their poses,

have been beautifully preserved in the plaster.

So if the people were struck by an intense blast of hot gas,

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.

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 of 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 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.

We have chosen to recreate the face of a cast

that now rests inside Pompeii's granary.

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.

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

'where Richard and I can view them.'

-Bingo!

-Look!

-It never ceases to amaze me.

-That's the expert eye, I think.

'The X-ray machine is essentially a camera,

'except instead of visible light, it uses X-rays to expose the image.

'Because X-rays can pass through the plaster more easily than

'human bone, when we photograph the body cast it projects a perfect

'image of the skull beneath the plaster.'

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?

From this, we can create a skull.

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

Two, three.

'The reconstruction team have also been given access to another

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

'The face we are going to recreate is that of a young woman

'who died in one of Herculaneum's 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.

'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.

Because the Bella Donna's skull isn't encased in plaster,

we don't need to use the X-ray machine.

Instead, we're going to map her entire skull with a 3D scanner.

'From this, we can create 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 use the 3D copy as a foundation from which to

'rebuild the face of this victim of Vesuvius.'

'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 is now starting to put flesh on the bones.

'Richard then uses wax to build the muscles.

'Their shape and contours are directly determined by the skull beneath.

'More wax is then added to simulate the outer layers of subcutaneous tissue and skin.

'Once the head is modelled, skin colour, hair and other details are added

'in consultation with archaeological experts.

'It takes Richard nearly 3 months to complete both heads.'

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

'The first head we are going to see is that of the Bella Donna.

This is what we've got.

It's a person.

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

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.

'The second face Richard has reconstructed is of the man

'who now lies in Pompeii's granary.

'I wonder what sort of face Richard has created for this mysterious figure.'

-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.

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.

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