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The Morbidly Fascinating Page

On this month's Morbidly Fascinating Page:

The National Archaeological Museum's display of ancient Pompeii victims

IN THE ARCHIVES:

The Body Farm
The First Plastic Surgery
Tombstone Symbols
Weird Photos
Stuckie
Two-Faced
Hyperdontia

museum

bodies

working

Photos of the bodies excavated from the Pompeii disaster below

sitting man

crawling

woman

man

man

face

bodies

face

Animals were not spared

dog and pig

horse

See the official website for the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy HERE

About the Pompeii exhibit in the National Archaeological Museum

The National Archaeological Museum of Naples (Italian: Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, sometimes abbreviated to MANN) is an important Italian archaeological museum, particularly for ancient Roman remains. Its collection includes works from Greek, Roman, and Renaissance times, and especially Roman artifacts from nearby Pompeii.

How were the "mummies" made for display?

As excavators uncovered human remains, they noticed that the skeletons were surrounded by voids in the compacted ash. By carefully pouring plaster of Paris into the spaces, the final poses, clothing, and faces of the last residents of Pompeii came to life.

What destroyed the city of Pompeii?

Mount Vesuvius, a volcano near the Bay of Naples in Italy, is hundreds of thousands of years old and has erupted more than 50 times. Its most famous eruption took place in the year 79 A.D., when the volcano buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii under a thick carpet of volcanic ash. The dust “poured across the land” like a flood, one witness wrote, and shrouded the city in “a darkness…like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.”

The famous lifelike poses of many victims at Pompeii --seated with face in hands, crawling, kneeling on a mother's lap--are helping to lead scientists toward a new interpretation of how these ancient Romans died in the A.D. 79 eruptions of Mount Vesuvius.

Until now it's been widely assumed that most of the victims were asphyxiated by volcanic ash and gas. But a recent study says most died instantly of extreme heat, with many casualties shocked into a sort of instant rigor mortis.

Two thousand people died, and the city was abandoned for almost as many years. When a group of explorers rediscovered the site in 1748, they were surprised to find that–underneath a thick layer of dust and debris–Pompeii was mostly intact. The buildings, artifacts and skeletons left behind in the buried city have taught us a great deal about everyday life in the ancient world.

Mount Vesuvius has not erupted since 1944, but it is still one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. Experts believe that another Plinean eruption is due any day--an almost unfathomable catastrophe, since almost 3 million people live within 20 miles of the volcano’s crater.