Thursday, September 11, 2014

The Remains of Vesuvius


One of the morbidly fascinating results of the 79 A.D. eruption of Vesuvius is the large number of holes found in the volcanic deposits around Pompeii that represented corpses of people and animals that were buried by the hot ash. The ash lithified before the corpses decayed so that a good mold of the deceased remained. Early in the excavation it was discovered that filling these molds with plaster produced remarkable casts of the victims of the eruption.

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