How Pompeii Worked

You can get tickets on ticket Master. And on May twenty three, we're gonna be in Cleveland and you can get tickets there at playhouse Square dot org. And then there's one more, Chuck, that's right. We're gonna wrap it up in Denver, specifically Inglewood, Colorado at the Gothic Theater on June and possibly adding a show on the twenty seven. Stay tuned for that, yep. And you can get ticks at a x S dot com. So come see us live. We'll have a good time. Come on out. Welcome to

Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm josh Ark. There's Charles W. Chuck. Bryant. There's Jerry over there. We're all wearing togas, which makes this stuff. You should know, the Ancient Roman edition or the Animal House edition. Yeah, it could be. I'm blueto. I just saw that that movie, that Netflix movie about Oh yeah, Doug Kenny and then Lampoon. Is it good? Well, the documentary is better? Oh is this like a biopic? Uh? Yeah,

I mean yeah, it's a movie movie. I got you. Yeah, I judge my UM. What I watch on Netflix just based on like the illustration or the drawing or the art. And sometimes that's a good rule of thumb, in other times it's not. But that one I kind of avoided it because of the art. Yeah, I mean it's not great. I kind of enjoyed it because I like all the people and it's kind of fun seeing someone be Bill Murray and someone beach I E. Chase and John Belushi in a little bit of the making of Animal House

and Caddyshack. But ultimately the documentary is much better. What's the name of the documentary, um a drunk, stoned, brilliant dead, or some combination of those words. I'm not sure I've come across that. Yeah, that's that's really good, but brilliant and feudal gesture. Feudal and stupid gesture. Yeah, that's right, is uh? I give it two stars. I don't know how out of how many, though, I've just been steady consuming Riff tracks as fast as they'll clear him on

Amazon Prime. Really, yeah, that stuff never gets old. It really doesn't. It really really doesn't. All right, Chuck. Now that we've gotten our initial tangent a k a. The introduction out of the way recommended viewing, right, Um, let's talk POMPEII. Yeah, because I mean that's what we're doing today. And frankly, it's two thousand and eighteen. We been doing this for almost a decade. Now we're coming up on a decade in a few months April. Yeah, and we

this is the first we're doing on Pompeii. And that is just utterly mind blowing to me. It really is, considering we've done shows on both volcanoes and super volcanoes. Um, and our our show on tiny volcanoes all right, Little is the Littlest volcano that was so good. It is weird that we're finally getting around to us. Yeah, it really is. Because we've also done like the Seven Wonders. We've done tons of archaeology stuff. It's it's strange. We

did one on the real Atlantis. Remember that one. Nope, it was a good one. You should go back and listen to it. Yeah. Yeah, I was like, oh, Monopoly, we haven't done one on that and looked it up, and yet we sure have. I do remember that one. I was scouring my brain like, okay, what what was this episode? Like? What did we talk about? Not? Then it's like it never happened. I mean, maybe we should just go back and re record some of these for our own benefit. Okay, reboot our own show, right just

for us. So um, okay, well, we are finally talking POMPEII, and to do that, we have to go back the way Back machine and we should probably bring helmets and the dog attack outfits that those those trainers wear. Yeah, and also we need to fuel the way Back with olive oil on this trip. Let's we need to retrofit it because we'll be in big trouble if we don't. Well, let's use the good stuff, like the really high grade stuff,

because it burns my throat. I like the mid grade e v O O. So let's save that for eating, use the high test stuff for traveling. Oh you don't like really get alive wood. No, I don't. I want to say that I do, but I don't. It burns my throat. Yeah, like when you just do shots of it. Yea, maybe that's the problem. Shot of olive oil, shot of crank case soil. Well, you know what they say, olive oil before crank case oil never sicker. No, it's the other.

Oh god, alright, So we're in the way back machine. We have our our rescue gear. We have our olive oil. It's our dog attack gear. Sure why because the dogs there? No, because of the falling pummice in stone that's about to hit the area. Yeah, but there. I just wondered because the very famously was a cast of a dog. And there's actually a very famous mosaic that says cave conum, which is aware of dog. So yeah, there are dogs there. Well, good thing, we got that suit right in our nice dispositions.

Good dog. Okay, So we're we're here. It's pretty nice. It's a very nice area. It's pretty well populated. This is Pompeii itself, and Pompeii is one of several towns right around here on the Bay of Naples. And if you look up over here, that giant, almost cartoonishly volcanic volcano over there, that's Vesuvious. It's like an eight year old drew a volcano and put it in Italy at the Bay of Naples by Naples, and uh, that's it. That's that's vesuvious. It's a it's what's called a strato volcano.

That's right. Uh, And well, I guess we should. You can go back and listen to volcanoes from December two thousand ten or super volcanoes just last April. But for those of you don't know, a strato volcano is sort of if you think about the just the run of the mill traditional volcano and a cartoon where it just pops like a champagne bottle, that's a strato volcano. Yeah, And it's it's actually just built up from previous explosions.

So the very presence of a strato Voultan cano indicates that there's been a lot of activity in that area and it's blown straight up into the air and then come down and settle down around it, and now you have a new layer and it just builds up as a cone. And the thing about the strato volcanoes, like

you said, it pops like a cork. The reason it does that is because the lava that's kind of slowly growing and building up over time, UM has gases that it seeps into the rock, the surrounding rock that makes up the volcano, right and Um. When those gases finally overcome a certain threshold, the pressure threshold, that's when that cork goes off. And it's about to happen, because it's

either August or September or October, and we're here in Pompeii. Yeah, and we should also mention to you there are other volcanoes around if you look around, because this isn't a unique area of Europe. That is called the companion arc. Uh, And there are quite a few, well not quite a few, but there are several volcanoes. Vesuvius obviously the most active

and deadly um and famous. But uh, what the companion arc is or companion is there's a process called subduction where basically a tectonic plate bumps up against another one and moves down into the mantle beneath the other plate. And that's what's going on here where the African plate is meeting the Eurasian plate. Right, so there's like all that um hot molten earth that's kind of bubbling up through that seam. And one of those holes is the

volcano that we know as Vesuvius. Right, Yes, okay, so we got here just in time to look around for a little bit and kind of take in the the culture of the area before the volcano. It is very nice. It was like a very very wealthy town, but not really an important town as far as the Roman Empire was concerned, but there were there was an inordinate amount of wealthy people, and those wealthy people were inordinately wealthy. Um, and they spend a lot of money on the town.

There's lots of statues everywhere. There's a good number of temples. Um. There's one to isis. Uh, there's one a Jupiter. Um. There's a big amphitheater and a big theater as well,

two separate things. Yeah, there's one that holds twenty thou people, which um at its peak, that's how many people lived in Pompeii, which is a very democratic thing to do to say that, hey, uh, we're gonna host a show here and we want everyone to be able to come right, and and that that's pretty cool that they did do that because there's a pretty mixed population in Pompeii at the time, Pompeii and suburban Pompeii, which included Herculaneum, uh,

Stabia and um, what was the other one, Chuck, there's uh plazas plazas aplanis okay, Okay, So there's a string of towns, but Pompeii is to finally the biggest of all of them, and that's kind of like the center of the area, right, But there's a lot of different people, a lot of different type of people who were kind of who kind of gravitated towards Pompeii. It was like a cosmopolitan area, right, So you had wealthy people, you have poor people, you have people from different areas. That's right.

And it was also kind of unique for its time and that it was it was a bit of a resort town, so wealthy people all around Italy. Actually some of them would have I guess what you would call it now would be a vacation home. Uh. And that kind of got me down a rabbit hole of vacationing, Like when did that actually begin? Because I had no idea that the people of ancient Italy vacation. Yeah, but apparently it's the thing. And even Nero is said to

maybe have had a place at Pompeii. Uh And I guess it's just you know, the weather here is lovely. There's wine and olive oil everywhere. Like I said, that big theater they built that and said one day Pink Floyd shall play here. Man, I watched that Echoes video like ten times while I was researching this. It's pretty cool. For those of you who don't know, Pink Floyd did a very famous live concert, um, well not concert concert for no one, a live performance um in front of whatever,

fifteen crew people that were filming it. Yeah, in the middle of the Amphitheater at Pompeii. Yeah. It's a little trippy, Yeah, just a dad um. But then David Gilmore a couple of years ago, um, I think in two thousand and sixteen did a show there with actual people there and it was the first con like attended concert event there since you know the volcano in Its really cool since the v I Yeah, but and that also is will

kind of see in a little while. That really gives away like just how accessible Pompeii is the excavated ruined city. Um that you could go see a David Gilmour concert there. Yeah. Um, Like I said, wine and olive oil was kind of one of the main trades. But it was just a a very rich farmland area because that volcanic soil is

so rich in nutrients. And they were right there by the water with the Sarno River and then right there on the bay, and they just like life live in life there was pretty good and even the slaves apparently could earn money and potentially even by their freedom, which was pretty unusual. Um. I have to say, also, you mean and I went to Pompeii, as I've told you, and I can attest about that that farmland and the

fertility of it. They have lemons, no joke, the size of your head, Like they look like you shouldn't you shouldn't stand too close to them. What do you do with that much? I don't, I don't know. I mean make lemonade, I guess if you're an optimist. Yeah, but it's just like you get one lemon and you've really got fourteen lemons pretty much. Mm hmm. I think you're just slowly but surely cut away at it, squeeze it into your face, pick up another piece, do it again. Gotcha?

Should we take a break? I think that we weren't ready for a break yet until that last joke, and now we are. Okay, So yeah, all right, we'll be back right after this and talk a little bit about the v I. Watch my sk but you should know sk alright, Chuck, what is the v I? The volcano incidet Oh? Okay, I didn't realize it had been abbreviated. Or the b O the big one. That's a good one too, So let's go with the let's go with the b oh okay. So um Pompey. It's this nice

driving city of twenty thousands. It's a resort area to um and on. I guess the morning of August, and we should say that date is actually up for debate. Well, I guess we'll talk about it a little more later, but we're going with August because that's the date that's still in use. Um there was a rumble from Vesuvius.

There was an earthquake in the area enough to like get everybody's attention, but supposedly that wasn't a very infrequent occurrence that that Vesuvius caused earthquakes pretty pretty frequently in the region, and it wasn't a big cause of panic. Yeah, Like one reason so many people died because I think because they were used to that kind of activity and they were like a big deal, We're used to the earth moving under our feet. No reason to flee the town, right.

There have been a pretty substantial earthquake sixteen years before and I think sixty three CE, where they had to reconstruct a lot of stuff, like entire temples and things have been knocked out. So I'm sure they were like, that's nothing compared to old sixty three, the quakes sixty three. Yeah. Yeah, and they also, um, they weren't panicked because they are the previous eruptions no one really knew about. There were no records of those. There wasn't even they didn't even

say volcano. There wasn't a word for volcano, right, So it wasn't really on their radar as Hey, this thing has happened before on a grand scale. Uh. They were just kind of enjoying their life. Yeah. There weren't cartoons back then to be like that's a cartoonishly volcanic volcano

that's right. So they that's kind of ironic too that they didn't realize that there was a long history of volcanic activity there, because it turns out that modern volcanologists and geologists and archaeologists are pretty sure that there are plenty of human settlements that were covered over by the volcano that by the time Pompeii was built, it was built atop these old settlements that have been covered over. So it's like lost city thanks to the volcano. Everybody forgets.

Somebody's like, oh, this is a nice area, will come

build here, covered over by volcano. Everybody forgets in the cycle repeats again, and that's where Pompeii found itself and by s and so on this day the earth rumbles And I want to direct you to this really great website called open Culture and just search Destruction of Pompeii Open Culture, and they have a video it's like eight minutes long, which is basically like a It's like they placed a camera in the c g I world of um Pompeii just and trained it on Vesuvius and left

it running for twenty four hours. And um, it really gets to point across of how destructive this this event would have been. Yeah, I think we I think you shouted that very same thing out on super Volcanoes. Had to have It's a really cool video. If you have you seen it, Yeah, yeah, I saw it after you shouted it out. Yeah. I watched it again this morning, and I think just from researching all of this stuff,

that really drove it home even more. It was kind of unsettling to watch this time, you know for sure. So uh, a little afternoon on is when this, um, when this when the champagne cork popped. Uh. And they were not ready for this. Uh, Like we said, just because of all the aforementioned reasons. Um. And the only account or one of the only accounts we have is we've talked about Plenty the Elder and his nephew, Plenty

the Younger before. Uh, they were not there. They were in my see Him, which is not too far away. It was on the northwestern edge of the Bay of Naples, but that's where Plenty the Elder was stationed. And then Plenty of the younger and his mom were there as well. Uh. And apparently when this started to go down, Um, Plenty the Elder got a message from a friend saying, hey, can you come and get me. It's going down. And he took off to go, and plenty the younger was like, no,

I'm gonna stay here, which was a pretty smart move. Yeah, and and what how do you pronounce that town? I never tried my scene him? Is that right? Okay? So he and his mom were there, and it's not really close. I mean, as far as like Pompeii is concerned. Pompei

is way closer to Vesuvius than mycene him is. But they still had an extremely harrowing um experience there on mycene him too, just from the fallout from Vesuvius um, even though Pompeii and Herculaneum and um uh Stabbia all got the worst of it um plenty the younger's account, it's the only firsthand account of the eruption of Vesuvius. Then um it's pretty scary stuff. Like he says, like the sky went dark, but not dark, like the moon

wasn't out, or there weren't any stars. He said, It's suddenly got dark like somebody put a light out in an enclosed room, like that kind of dark, like apparently you couldn't see people just a few feet ahead of you. They just got real dark, real fast. Yeah, and you can you can read his entire account online. But here's another nice pull quote. You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. There were some who prayed for death. In their terror of dying,

many besought the aid of the gods. But still more imagine there were no God's left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness forever more. It's pretty grim, geez. So this is again in Messenti Um, I think I'm not saying that right still him my seeing him um and Pompeii, the situation is much much, much worse. And Pliny the Younger was saying that they were kind of

huddled in I think a house or something somewhere. But even in this house, the ash that was like accumulating around them and on top of them was so much that they had to stand up every once in a while and shake it off. It was again much worse

in Pompeii itself. There's a lot of ash falling and covering people inside their houses and under structures, and either you stay there and start to worry about getting buried, or even worse, you start to worry about the roof collapsing under the weight of all that gathering ash and pummice, or you risk going out and being hit by one of those pummice rocks, which if you've ever picked up a volcanic rock, it is way lighter because it's very porous,

way lighter than a like a sedimentary rock of the same size. But you still wouldn't want to get hit in the head by one of those things after it's falling twenty miles out of the sky. And this is actually what they think. Um the height that this ejective coming out of the volcano reached was twenty miles or something like thirty two kilometers, I think. Yeah, So here's

here's a couple of stats for you. Um ash was falling at a rate of about six inches an hour, which is, you know, that's if you imagine that as rain, and if you've ever seen a rain like that, that's an unbelievable amount of rain. So imagine that is ashuh lava was flowing at about sixty eight miles an hour by the time it started sailing down the hillside, right right. So so you've got a few things you've got the first explosion, the eruption, where like you said, the court

goes off, the ejective goes into the air. Pliny described it as like a great pine tree with a big long trunk, and then way up high it branches out, and those are now called pliny in eruptions um. And then later on from all this activity, the the cone of the volcano collapses, and when that happened, it shot out this pyroclastic flow, which is made up of ash and hot gas. From between. I think I saw four hundred to fiftundred degrees fahrenheight, which is um a substantial

amount in celsius too. That's the that's the that's the translation, and it's it's like you said, flowing. I saw a hundred miles an hour. You saw sixty three miles. But I mean that's one of those that's one of those things that I'm sure you know they can't really tell exactly, but at any rate that it's going to be super fast, super fast, super hot. And they think now, before they thought that everybody in Pompeii died from being covered in ash um, they think now that they actually died much

more quickly than that. Right when that priorro clastic flow was anywhere near them, especially when it overtook them, it would have killed them instantly, which actually is we'll see accounts for some of the faces that we've have been found around on the people of the Pompeii victims. Yeah, and they even think, and by the way, we went right past the fact that pyrocastic flow is a great, great band name. It really is. Uh but they even think now that most of them died from head injuries

even before that even happened. Oh really, I hadn't seen that one. Yeah, well we'll get to that. I'll just though there's a tease. Uh. So this is shortly after midnight is when herculan a Um was covered and obliterated. About six thirty a m. The following morning is when Pompeii started getting hit with this flow. The whole thing takes about twenty five hours for all, for about two plus square miles to get completely destroyed. Yeah, and it

in nineteen hours. It shot out something like one cubic mile of rock and ash out of that volcano a cubic mile. Imagine looking up and seeing a mile cube and it's just all coming down on you well, and again seeing this and not like not even knowing what a volcano is, Yeah, it makes it any scarier, I guess. But they must have thought the world was ending. Well yeah, I mean if they thought there were no more gods, I would guess that that that they would think like, well,

this is it, this is the end of middle um. Uh. Plenty of the younger two wrote about uh about the water, the sea retreating as I pushed by the earthquakes. And so the thought now is is that it also caused

a tsunami at the climax of this eruption. So now imagine you know, the Bay of Naples flowing inland while all of this destruction is raining down around you, right, yeah, and then you definitely think the world is there's actually there's a very famous beach at Herculaneum, uh where there's a lot of there were a lot of bodies found, and there's a thirty ft boat that was just kind of like jammed up against them. And I guess that would have been from the tsunami. It would have brought

it in well. And that's apparently just to finish up with Plenty of the elder he did initially he was going to go out in a big boat and kind of just get a better look at what was going on. But when he got this message from his friends saying, hey, come rescue us, Uh, he got in a fast boat as sailing cutter, and which is probably was his end because by the time they got there, the winds were

blowing in a weird direction apparently. Uh, the way they usually blow it would have blown a lot of this out to sea, but unusually it was blowing in in the opposite direction that day, So a lot of things kind of came together for you know, the worst possible scenario. But um, so plenty of the elder gets nearby, I think, um they landed it. Uh pompa Pampa neanis I think it was at Stabbia. Oh where plenty of the Elder landed. Yeah,

his friend was pomp pomp Panius. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, that was who's going to rescue and Pompannius was at Stabbia, this little super ultra wealthy resort area. Yeah. So, uh they couldn't get out of there basically because of their I think their boat was so light and they kept pushing them back in and um apparently said Hey, let's ride it out here. That's where only choice and he was, he basically died. They couldn't get him up in the theory for a while that is that he died of

inhaling toxic fumes. But now modern historians and scientists are saying, now he was fat and kind of old and out of shape and he died of a heart attack. Yeah. I think the consensus among historians today is that he was boss hog esque, good way to put it. Yeah, so that's a that's a not a good end for Pliny the Elder, But um, that's kind of cool to be able to say, like, yeah, I died at Pompeii? Is it? I was a super famous dude in the Roman world, and where did I find my end? Pompeii

another famous thing in the Roman world. That's how you'd say that kind of thing. I think it's neat. So Pliny the Elder died. Pliny the Younger lived, though, and we know about all of this because again he was an eyewitness. He was also a historian, a statesman, just

all around smart dude. But he didn't write his um his letter to Tacitus the Historian for like twenty seven years after the fact, and so, um, yeah, I don't know if he just heard Tacitus was getting a history together and he wanted to contribute, or what what the what the difference was, or what the deal was with the gap. But there is a lot of um, there's a lot of disagreement about whether his date of August

is the correct one. The reason everyone says August twenty is because he wrote that in the letter, he said that this happened on August twenty. The thing is, apparently there are other drafts of his letter that same letter that either didn't give the date or gave a different date later on, I think of November twenty four. And then there's a lot of actual circumstantial evidence that suggests that this actually took place either on October twenty or

November twenty four rather than augusty. So there's things like there was a there was a just an inordinate amount of pomegranates and figs and nuts found around the town, which would suggest that the harvest had just happened the autumn harvest, which you wouldn't have done in August. U there's a coin that that had a um a title of Caesar that wasn't bestowed until September of seventy nine,

so that coin, Yeah, that coin shouldn't have existed. There's there's all this evidence that's coming together that says no, it actually probably was either October November, but it's just been August for so long now that it's going to be another ten twenty years before everybody's like it happened in October and November. Yeah, and truth be told, that's sort of one of those things that wonky archaeologists would

argue over. I hear it, and I think, what's a couple of months really, you know, but I just think it's it's it's really fascinating that that they found a coin and they said, Okay, this coin shouldn't exist. And the reason why because because there was um there was a like Britain was conquered by the Romans a little around like around that time, and so they minted a coin to honor that. And because that coin shows up and POMPEII we can date when Vesuvius erupted more accurately.

That to me is it's just eye popping, like, look at my eyes, good old fashioned police work. So either one, so Vesuvius has spoken Pompeii has now gone. It's covered in something like um, I believe ten meters like about

thirty ft of ash and pummice. Yeah, I've seen all kinds of anywhere from like eight to so it's covered up a lot of And I don't know if we said this or not, but um, of the twenty thousand people, about eighteen thousand of those residents left when there was the first sign of trouble, because again Vesuvius gave plenty of warning. But there were about two thousand people in the town of Pompeii itself when Vesuvius went off and covered the town. But now it's everything's calm, it's quiet,

Vesuvius is quiet again, and Pompeii herculaneum stabia applautas they're gone. Yeah, and I think about two total people in the region died. Oh really that many? Huh yeah, among that, you know, the two square miles. So so this the the whole area has just been radically changed. Um. And these cities were so lost that even the people who stayed in the area and continued to live there, they lost track of exactly where Pompeii was, and they stopped talking about it.

Eventually there's another city named Pompei that was founded many many years later. That's the modern Pompeii. And if they ever even referenced Pompeii, they just called it uh lah chi vita the city, and they just knew that there was a lost city somewhere in the area. And that's how things stayed for about the next um seventeen hundred years. That's right, And you want to take a break, yes, all right, Well we'll get into the discovery of Pompeii

after this. Watch sk sk all right, dude, we're back. That's right. So what we've got here as far as Roman history pre POMPEII and post Pompeii, UH is they've focused a lot on um what they would call the important people of society, so military stuff, wealthy people, political stuff. They didn't say, like, hey, maybe be valuable to record what it's like for um, everyday people of Rome because

they didn't care. That's why Pompeii and the the rediscovery and the excavation over the years has been so important is because all of these a lot of these people and in the shops and all the homes and the art were really well preserved. Uh, once they started digging into this stuff, which was a pretty remarkable flind and continues to be. Yeah. Plus, um, Rome was around for

so long. It has been around for so long that it evolved, right, So over time, what Rome once was culturally historically um is kind of lost and replaced as the culture itself evolves in ages. And apparently it grew more and more conservative the longer it was around. And one of the things that Pompeii also gives us the snapshot of Roman culture before it became conservative, and it was hyper sexual at the time when Pompeii was covered over.

So that was another thing because at the time, until Pompeii was discovered, UM, everyone considered Rome, ancient Rome as this very staid, conservative civilization. And then they started to discover this stuff from pompeign and we're like, whoa, what were these people into back then? Yeah, there's a lot of highly erotic art. Yeah, I saw a statue of the god pan having graphics sex with a goat, like a pretty pretty realistic statue. And they found that they

dug that out of Pompeii pretty early on. And there's phalluses they found everywhere. Some people put fallacies on their houses, like sticking out into the street. Um there was pre Apiss, which is a lesser god who um was extraordinarily unsettlingly well endowed. Um, there was just a lot of fertility stuff and a lot of just explicit sexuality in their in their artwork back then. And Rome eventually moved on past that, and it had been forgotten until Pompeii gave

up its secrets. Yeah, so uh kind of immediately afterward up until about the seventeen hundreds throughout and like I said, like you said, it was kind of forgotten for a little while. But during this whole long period of time, Pompeii was kind of essentially rated again and again by either um, you know, people hunting for valuables or kings and queens who wanted to plunder things, you know, like

statues and stuff for their own palaces. And this sort of happened again and again throughout history until about the eighteen hundreds, when like legit archaeology really started to happen where they could go in there with the name and actually preserving some of the stuff. Yeah. I think the earliest ones were the king, the Bourbon King, Charles, the third who. It was discovered under his watch in seventeen

forty eight. And then the French came into the area, and by this time they were crazy about archaeology thanks to their fascination with Egypt, so they brought in some pretty good practices. But even still, I mean, compared to what archaeologists know and do today, this is pretty hokey, basic backward archaeological methodology. Yeah. Like even when they started to do it right, Uh, they just weren't as advance

as we are today. Um. But things kind of change for the better when a man named Giuseppe Fiorelli came along in eighteen sixty and he said, hey, I'm in charge now. UM, I'm gonna get in here and try and do it right. I'm gonna be way more careful. My team is going to be more careful. We're gonna record all the positions of people, everything that we find. And that's when it that's when it really legitimized, um

kind of what was going on as far as excavation goes. Uh. And he also made his name most famously for what ended up being named after him, the Fiarelli process is when he saw these you know, every you know everything's kind ever an ash and hardened, so they had they were basically encased in these you know, over the years, the bodies would run away, and so they were encased in these hollow cavities. The people were and dogs and

you know, all sorts of animals. So he said, why don't we inject this, guess, so this plaster into these cavities and see what we come up with. And what he came up with very famously, We're we're the uh well, we're the people of POMPEII, like more than a thousand of them. Yeah, do you remember our Molderrama episode that

just came out. I do remember that. So when these people were covered in that ash and their bodies rotted away, it left what is effectively emold, and he filled it with that that plaster and made plaster casts of them, right and and apparently really detailed once I saw him, But I didn't see anything as detailed as like Ed points out that you can see like the um the design somebody had shaved into their pubic hair. That's pretty pretty detailed plaster cast of a dead person from two

thousand years ago. Um, there was you can very famously see, um a man like agony on a man's face, like like you just captured at the moment of death, just basically flash frozen a lot like Hansolo and carbonite. Yeah, it was. It was a huge, huge find and it just kind of shook the world, and uh, reproductions and photos of all these casts became the sensation of the day all over the world. Um. Like I said, there's a very famous one of a dog kind of writhing

in pain on his back. It's one of the more sad ones. It looked like he had a collar onto which is interesting although that I've later seen where that might have been a fake, which I don't fully understand. Yeah, I hadn't seen that at all because there were no bones inside of it. Uh so they're not quite sure about that one. But um, they're just some really sad ones of like what is clearly a mother like holding her child. Um, families and couples and embrace and like

horrific embrace. Uh And it's just really kind of sad to look through these these photos and they kept finding them, like all over the place. They were just groups of people huddled. When they would excavate a house, uh, they would they would find bodies quite frequently, and like you said, like in that that that those embraces just caught in their last moment, like their literal last moment was just caught in time. So it was it was quite a fine and like you said, it really definitely caught the

imagination of the rest of the world. Um, so much so that there was like a Greek neo classical revival in the Enlightenment period because everyone had Pompey fever when it was discovered Pompey fever. Pompey fever catch it. So a couple of years ago, I guess a few years ago now, a group did CT scans on some of these casts about I think thirty or forty of them and that dog and that boar uh, and they this

provide it just a lot more detail of um. So if you like, you can look at the casts and then look at the CT scan and it kind of brings it to life. Uh. And they found it revealed a few really interesting things. UM. One is that the people of Pompeii had almost perfect teeth, which had been really unusual at the time. And they think it's because they ate a lot of fruits and vegetables. Very little sugar, and that the water was heavily fluoridated, so they all

had really like nice straight teeth. Um. And then what I was talking about the head injuries. This is there's an article in the Atlantic called How the People of Pompei Really Died, And almost all of these CT scans revealed that they had head injuries from getting you know, smashed in the head from this volcanic rock. What a

way to go. Yeah, although I guess it would be quick right well, either way, even if it's that, or if it's um what you were saying, it's not the slow suffocating death that they used to think it was, which is way better. Um. I saw also check there was an excavation of like a latrine, I guess, and and just a normal housing block where poor people or middle class workers would have lived. And um, they found

evidence of really great diets. And they think that the people of Pompeii, the rich people actually probably ate a little worse because they ate slightly richer food. But uh, everyone there, including the lower classes, were very like well fed on very healthy foods, basically like the Mediterranean diet like you think of today. Um. And that they were also taller on average than the citizens of the area today. Interesting. Yeah, it's usually the exact opposite if you think about it.

You know, George Washington four ft tall. Everybody knows that they They also found in some of the um I think the runoff into the drainage systems or something they found. You know, you were talking about the rich people eating more exotic meats. They found evidence at the eight Sea urchin. So I'll give him that because people eat that flamingo hadn't seen that one. I know it's coming there. Giraffe. Yeah, who looks at a giraffe and says, I wonder what

that tastes like? And then does it? Follows through on it? It's the following through part that really knocks my socks off. So those are some recent excavations, right, yeah, I mean this is the kind of stuff that has come out with things like DNA analysis. Okay, so so this is

extraordinarily new as far as Pompey goes. POMPEII is it's really cool because it's got its ancient history when it was covered over by Vesuvius, but then it also has a secondary history of its discovery and then it's it's excavations since then, and apparently it's the longest continuously excavated site in the world as far as archaeology goes. I

wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised. It is extraordinarily big Um and the the fact that it's been around for so long, it's been excavated for so long, it was basically there when archaeology was born. Archaeological techniques that have been developed over the age have all been tried and tested and frequently discarded at Pompeii UH And as a result, a lot of those early ones that were just just not very smart have actually had a They've had a pretty

tough effect on the town. Like um, the frescoes. They discovered frescoes, which are paintings on plaster walls all over the town. Most houses had really beautiful frescoes, and the workers were like, well, these are gonna flake off. This is back in the nineties, so we need to we need to do something. So they covered him in paraffin wax, which I guess it makes sense. It's covered in wax. We can figure out what to do with it later. Maybe we never will, but you can still kind of

see through it. The problem is that the pigments bonded to the wax, not just rubbed off, like molecularly bonded with the wax. And then as water grew behind the walls and seeped through the walls behind the painting, it pushed the painting off the walls onto the wax. So now if you want to get this wax off, they finally developed a technique where you can use a laser that just removes the wax and leaves the pigment. But um, that's extraordinarily new to I think just in the last

couple of years they started using that. Before then they would do things like use gasoline and stuff to get the wax off and it would just take the fresco clean off. Yeah, I'm surprised there's anything left between being continually rated um, earthquakes since then, World War Two, since then, vandals, tourists, rainwater. Uh, it's just like it's been just beaten up for thousand,

you know, like a couple of thousand years now. But there's, like you in there, there's still a lot of stuff there, Yeah, there is. I think they they've uncovered two thirds of it, they think, and so they've gotten to this point now where they're like, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. I think in the nineteen nineties, whoever was the director of archaeology at Pompey said we need to stop excavating.

We're gonna leave the what's left for later generations who have better techniques to to uncover, and we're going to focus on preserving what's here now. Um, which is a big deal because it's a World Heritage site. And UNESCO basically came in in two thirteen and they effectively condemned it. Like what a city would do to a building that was falling down. That's what you meant new Unesco did to the Pompey site. They said, this this thing is toast,

it's it's they put it on the Endanger List. Uh. And one of the big reasons is is tourists, Well, while when you're there you're like, are are you sure I'm allowed to be sitting on this thing and taking a funny picture or I'm I'm really allowed to walk through here? They let you go almost everywhere on that site,

touch everything, run around. It's it's just like a big playground basically, and you have to stop and remind yourself, wait, this is an archaeological site in operations still and um they they the the fact that tourists have been allowed to do that for so long, it's had a huge effect on the deterioration of the site itself too. Yeah. Well not only that, but it's um, it's been corrupt

over the years, the management of these ruins. UM. A lot of the structures have collapsed over time completely and gone away. And then finally in two thousand and twelve, the EU and the Italian government finally got together and said, listen, we need to really reinvest in this in this find here, and it's called the Great Pompeii Project, and they invested about a hundred hundred and five million euros to try

and repair and preserve what they have left. UM. I'm surprised they haven't closed down more parts of it, because, like you said, you can still go everywhere. But what they have done is restored a lot of these frescoes and mosaics, like you were saying, Um, a lot of the best work has been done in the last five years. Yeah, easily to try and get this thing preserved as much

as they can at this point. Yeah. And one of the things that got them going was the um the gladiator school, which is a pretty big structure that housed the gladiators where they trained in town, and it it crumbled, it felt it turned into ruins um because it had gotten eroded I think by drainage. And one of the things they're figuring out now is that there was a pretty decent sewer system underneath these towns, but that pyroclastic flow covered it all up, so the water has nowhere

to go but over the ruins. And over the last hundred and fifty years it's eroded some of these buildings. That's another thing they're dealing with. Two. And I don't know if you said enough of the Herculaneum conservation project, did you mention that, uh, the Great Pompei or the Herculaneum the Herculaneum. So there's a there's like a model for for dealing with these sites, to preserve these sites,

and it's in Herculaneum. It was apparently worse off than pomp Pay for a long time, and the public private partnership took control of the thing, and now it's like the model of how to how to rescue sites like this. So it's possible that Pompeii project will will be successful and in like twenty years there will probably be walkways everywhere that are raised above ground and you won't be

able to touch anything. Um. I would guess if you want to be able to touch Pompey, you should go in the next few years, because I don't think they're gonna keep allowing that for much longer. If you want to touch Pompeii, if you want to touch it, do you got anything else? Well, it's Pompey, man, we did it finally. Okay, Well, if you want to touch Pompeii,

you should go to Pompeii. Uh. And in the mean time, while you're waiting to do that, you should type pomp pay into the search bart how stuff works dot com, which we'll bring up this great article by the grap stor. And since I said graps, there's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this Artifacts and our Monuments from Germany. Hey, guys, just finish the episode on public monument removal and it

was fantastic as usual. It made me think of the monument removal in other parts of the world, in particular in Germany. Comes to mind because I studied German all through high school and college to a study abroad there first summer. The way German street. Their Nazi history is different. UM. By no means an expert, but as I understand that they do everything in their power to prevent their citizens from idolizing or idealizing Nazi Germany. UM, you can't buy

mind comp which I think that's true. Didn't it? I think so. There are no statues or monuments of any kind. They're not sanitizing their history or pretending it didn't happen, but they don't want to commemorate it either. Anyway. In honor of today being the day the Berlin Wall has has been gone longer than it was up, I'd like to recommend that you see the movie Goodbye Lennon if you haven't never seen it. It's great. It takes place when the Berlin Wall comes down in the first year

or so after during German reunification. Funny and thoughtful and sad and just really really good. It's one of my favorite movies. And no spoilers, but it has my favorite scene ever of a monument being removed. UM and I looked it up. It was I think it was nominated for Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and a host of other like Baptis and European Awards. So it looks pretty good. Um, look forward to you in the new episodes. And that is from Ellie. Nice. Thanks a lot, Ellie

appreciate that email, very thoughtful. I don't think Germany was even allowed to have a flag for a while. I'm not mistaken. Yeah. Um, all right, well that's it. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at josh Um Clark and s y s K podcast, Chuck's at Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know and slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast, how stuff Works dot com and it's always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com. M