If you mean the plaster casts made of the people who perished in the eruption of the Vesuvius: the dead bodies of the fleeing citizens were immediately and completely covered with a thick layer of ashes, produced by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. This meant that the bodies decomposed very slowly for lack of oxygen, while the ashes around them gradually hardened to an almost rock-like material.
Over time, the bodies finally did decompose and disappear, but the ashes had long before 'set' around their original form and position. The result was a sort of cavity within the hardened ashes in the form of the original body. All it then took was to simply fill all those body-shaped cavities with plaster, let it harden and then remove the ashes around the plaster.
About 2,000
Some casts of the dead are kept on display in Pompeii. The rest are kept in storage and I believe that some are are located in the Naples Archaeology Museum.
The bodies were not stone, but they had been covered in ash which then hardened, creating hallows where the bodies were. The people who uncovered Pompeii poured plaster into the holes creating plaster casts.
Get art? No. Pompeii was a Roman town and the Romans made art in Pompeii by creating frescoes and statuary and garden decor.Get art? No. Pompeii was a Roman town and the Romans made art in Pompeii by creating frescoes and statuary and garden decor.Get art? No. Pompeii was a Roman town and the Romans made art in Pompeii by creating frescoes and statuary and garden decor.Get art? No. Pompeii was a Roman town and the Romans made art in Pompeii by creating frescoes and statuary and garden decor.Get art? No. Pompeii was a Roman town and the Romans made art in Pompeii by creating frescoes and statuary and garden decor.Get art? No. Pompeii was a Roman town and the Romans made art in Pompeii by creating frescoes and statuary and garden decor.Get art? No. Pompeii was a Roman town and the Romans made art in Pompeii by creating frescoes and statuary and garden decor.Get art? No. Pompeii was a Roman town and the Romans made art in Pompeii by creating frescoes and statuary and garden decor.Get art? No. Pompeii was a Roman town and the Romans made art in Pompeii by creating frescoes and statuary and garden decor.
Bodies where buried under volcanic ash. The bodies themselves decayed but left cavities that preseved their dying poses. Archaeologists later poured plaster into these cavities to form casts of the people.
The bodies decomposing left a small cavity surrounding the remains. The ash hardened leaving a mold of the person containing just the bones. They located the cavity, drilled a small hole, filled the hole with plaster, then removed the plaster cast containing the bones from the ash.
Giuseppe Fiorelli was an archaeologist, who made major contributions to the study of Pompeii. He trained archaeologists in the layer by layer method of unearthing, thus preserving artifacts. He initiated a method of uncovering the houses of Pompeii from the top down to the street, minimizing any loss or further damage to the buildings. He is most famous for developing the plaster casts of the people, animals and plants that were covered in ash thereby giving us the lifelike features of the victims.
The statues of the dead people in Pompeii were made by pouring liquid plaster into the cavities left by their decayed bodies. This process created detailed casts that preserved the final poses and expressions of the victims at the moment of their deaths during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Most of the houses or buildings in Pompeii were made of stone
Pompeii was originally a "Samnite" town. The Roman term for the Oscan speaking peoples of southern Italy was Samnite. Inscriptions have been unearthed in Pompeii written in the old Oscan language.
It is not possible to make the same kind of casts at Herculaneum as Fiorelli made in Pompeii. In Pompeii, the ash fallout settled around bodies then hardened, creating a cavity in the shape of the body. Herculaneum experienced different conditions to Pompeii in the eruption; it was covered in a thick layer of hot volcanic material sometimes described as 'mud' which did not harden around the shape of the bodies in the same way as the ash did in Pompeii. So the remains that have been found in Herculaneum have been skeletons, (remembering that of course in Pompeii a skeleton is inside the plaster cast, and many skeletons were also found there that were not cast).Interestingly, the casting technique is today being used to make a modern cast of the actual remains; these can be displayed without the issue of whether human remains should be viewed. Some of the skeletons of Herculaneum from the beachfront have been recently cast in this way for display purposes.See 'Pompeii & Herculaneum: Interpreting the Evidence' by Dr Brian Brennan and Dr Estelle Lazer.
Tufa or basalt stones