The bodies of Pompeii had been covered in layers of fine ash that calcified over the centuries, forming a type of protective shell around their bodies.
When the skin and tissue of these bodies eventually decayed, they left voids in the layer of ash around them in the exact shape of the victims in their final moments.
In 1864, Giuseppe Fiorelli, the director of the excavations, came up with an ingenious idea for reconstructing the bodies. Fiorelli and his team decided to pour plaster into the voids. They let the plaster harden, then chipped away the outer layers of ash,
which left behind the cast of the volcano's victims at the time of their deaths. Many of the victims remain frozen in contorted positions.
The body casts are on display in Pompeii and they are a powerful reminder that despite the millennia that separate us, the people who lived there were as human as we are.