Giuseppe Fiorelli

So they were kind of mining Pompeii for loot, and it wasn't even confirmed to be Pompeii until 1763 when they finally dug up an inscription and found the name of the town.

But the actual turning point here, the moment that Pompeii went from kind of just being a treasure hunter's dream to actually being a record, came a century later when one guy, Giuseppe Fiorelli, who actually took the excavations seriously in 1860.

Fiorelli was a really a modern thinker.

He was a different kind of person.

The forensic analysis of those bones, published in the 1990s and refined in the decades since, remains some of the most detailed evidence ever assembled about what a pyroclastic surge does to a human body.

In 1863, the Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who had been appointed director of excavations at Pompeii, made a discovery that would transform the site from a collection of ruins into something far more visceral.

He noticed that the hardened volcanic deposit, the compacted ash and pumice that had buried the city to a depth of roughly six meters, contained cavities, hollow spaces in the shape of human bodies, where the organic material had long since decomposed, but the surrounding ash had hardened into a rigid mold.

Fiorelli realized that if he poured liquid plaster of Paris into these voids and let it set, the resulting cast would reproduce the exact shape of the body at the moment of death.

He was right.

The first plaster casts were revelatory.