【紀錄片】龐貝古城 揭秘被凍結於時光中的人【雙語特效字幕】【紀錄片之家字幕組】

Pompeii is one of the most iconic monuments of the Roman world. Millions of tourists come here every year to see the remains of this ancient city destroyed by the volcano Vesuvius. I'm Margaret Mountford. I've always been fascinated by ancient history. And it doesn't get much better than this. What makes Pompeii so special are these remarkable relics. They're not statues. These are the remains of people frozen in the last few seconds of their lives. This is like looking at people who are asleep. Nothing like them has ever been seen anywhere else. They are unique. That almost looks like the way a boxer defends himself, doesn't it? Everything here is so well preserved. We know almost every detail of what happened on those days in August 79 A.D. The earthquakes, the massive eruption, the hail of ash, rock and pumice. We even know the stories of many of the people who perished. But why they are fixed in these extraordinary positions had been a mystery for centuries. Now it seems that vital clues have been overlooked. Using new technology. That's really the person. It's phenomenal. And state-of-the-art experiments. Wow. Nobody would have survived that, would they? We are going to find out once and for all why these people are caught in these strange positions. That's a beautiful image. Look at that. It's like a portrait. And for the first time ever, we are going to do something extraordinary. We are going to bring you face to face with two people who died here 2,000 years ago. That's amazing. That's just amazing. Pompeii, southern Italy. Over the last 265 years, this fascinating city has slowly been excavated from beneath 6 meters of volcanic ash. Archaeologists have rediscovered a world frozen in time nearly 2,000 years ago. But this city's last great secret is yet to be revealed. How exactly did its population die? And why were their bodies so beautifully preserved? This is my first visit to Pompeii. And showing me around the casts is Paul Roberts. He is head of the Roman collections at the British Museum. The first stop in my investigations is close to the walls of the city. Beneath what is thought to have been a livery stable are the remains of three people. These are the first casts I've seen. And I was expecting to see something like white marble statues. This is like looking at people who are asleep. The amazing thing is that inside those plaster casts are real people who were walking around in Pompeii, then running for their lives, and then died here. We don't have casts like this from anywhere else, do we? Pompeii is unique in that respect in preserving the imprints, the casts of the real people. The figure in the center is the largest man ever found in Pompeii. He has a far bigger build than the average Roman. This has led people to believe he may have been a gladiator brought here from Africa. Most gladiators were slaves, criminals or prisoners of war who were forced to fight for a living. On either side of this giant are two other figures. An adult male and what is thought to be a young boy. These two casts were found together, and many people believe they are the remains of a father and his son. One story goes that the family ran the livery stable outside the city gates. They would unload the carts that came in from the surrounding countryside and then distribute the fresh produce around the city. Life for children in Pompeii was hard. They were forced to work alongside their parents as only the offspring of the wealthy went to school. One day, this young boy may have taken over his father's job. But this was not to be. I find it quite difficult to know actually how I should be reacting to them because I do find it strange that we're standing here looking at these bodies. It is a very strange sensation to look at them, but I think if we try and look through them to imagine looking through their eyes and to see them as real people, then that's not disrespectful at all. That actually gives them back a bit of the life that they once had. I've visited lots of Roman sites, but I've never seen plaster casts of human bodies like the ones they have here. Normally the archaeologists find bones lying in mud or under rocks, but here the bodies left behind these strange casts, and I want to find out what was different here and why those casts were left behind. To find out exactly what did happen here nearly 2,000 years ago and to discover why whole bodies were preserved, we need to travel back in time to the day of the eruption. August 24th, 79 A.D. Just before midday, a powerful earthquake rocked the quiet countryside around the mountain. Then at around 1 o'clock, Vesuvius erupted. The giant plug of dirt and rock which had blocked the mouth of the volcano was hurled into the air. A huge cloud of ash and dust formed high above the volcano. The cloud was pushed nearly 14 kilometres into the atmosphere, forced up by a powerful column of gas and debris. The cloud spread across the sky like black ink. It was so dense it blocked out the sun and turned the sky above Pompeii to night. And then came the downpour. Only this wasn't rain. It was a barrage of fine ash, rock and lumps of solidified lava known as pumice stone. In less than an hour, the eruption column had grown to almost 32 kilometres high. Every second, one and a half million tonnes of debris was pushed high into the stratosphere and then fell back down onto the beleaguered city below. Pompeii was buried under a blanket of volcanic ash. As panic ensued, people tried to escape. But far worse was to come. Today, Pompeii is unlike any other Roman ruin. This is a city frozen in time. It offers us an unrivalled insight into life in the ancient world. But it also lets us see the very people who once walked these cobbled streets. These remains are not just exhibits in a museum. They're loaded with clues which can help forensic scientists discover how these people actually died. The one thing is certain, it wasn't lava. At temperatures up to 1200 degrees, molten lava leaves little or no human remains. So if the culprit wasn't lava, what else could it have been? And why are the bodies of the dead in such strange positions? This one is sitting, with his hands covering his face. This one is pushing himself up off the ground. And this one seems to have just fallen asleep. It's as if time stopped and the people froze. For decades, it was thought that the ash that fell like rain on the city of Pompeii was also responsible for killing its people. With the air thick with ash and debris, it was assumed that the people suffocated. And the main reason for that is down to one of the most famous casts in Pompeii. This man's remains were found near the body of a mule. And so he's been named the muleteer. Muleteers held one of the lowest social positions, but they were vital for transporting goods around the city. They knew the narrow streets of Pompeii better than anybody. But this knowledge didn't help him escape from the day of the eruption. His remains now sit in Pompeii's granary. This crouching figure, his hands raised to his face, was taken as proof that the people of Pompeii were suffocated by the ash raining down from Vesuvius. But Dr Peter Baxter from Cambridge University thinks the muleteer's pose has been misinterpreted. Peter, this is one of the most famous casts here, isn't it? And people used to think that this position showed that this individual had choked to death or been asphyxiated by ash. What does the posture tell us? Well, when the early archaeologists saw this cast, they automatically jumped to the conclusion that the victims died as a result of the heavy ash fall from the volcano and that they very quickly got covered and buried in ash and suffocated in the ash fall. And so the hands were protecting the nose? So the hands were in effect protecting the mouth from breathing in the ash coming down in the air around them. So people used to think that this individual had asphyxiated, had choked to death. Is this the kind of posture someone would have if that had happened to them? It's unlikely. They're more likely to be unconscious on the ground rather than crouching like this. So if the people here didn't suffocate on the ash and weren't consumed by lava, what did kill them and fix their bodies in these strange positions? To solve this mystery, scientists had to look beyond Pompeii to another town that was also destroyed by the volcano Vesuvius. Six kilometres from the volcano sits Herculaneum. Until the 18th century, this town lay hidden under 20 metres of volcanic debris. It was only rediscovered when a farmer, digging a well on his property, struck the remains of a marble building. Herculaneum was much smaller than Pompeii. It was home to around 5,000 people, but its population was far wealthier. Herculaneum was once an exclusive holiday resort where Rome's rich and powerful relaxed in absolute comfort, their needs catered to by an army of slaves. But all that wealth and influence couldn't protect them from the disaster that was about to unfold. Herculaneum is much closer to Vesuvius than Pompeii is, so the people felt the force of the earthquake and eruption far more strongly. They must have watched in horror as a vast cloud of debris shot into the air... and then run for their lives. When excavators first began to uncover Herculaneum, they were surprised by how few human remains were found compared to the many hundreds uncovered in Pompeii. They assumed that the population had escaped. But then in the 1980s, archaeologists turned their attention to a series of boat sheds that once lined the beach. Dr Pier Paolo Petroni is an anthropologist who excavated three of these boat sheds. That's horrific. So how many people were found in here? In this chamber during the excavation we found 20 individuals. But all together in the chambers and outside are 300 skeletons of people. So they'd run here to escape? Very probably they knew what an earthquake was and at the beginning of eruption very probably there were a lot of earthquakes. So they thought this place to be a good place to shelter. But actually this was a very, very worse place for sheltering by the eruption. The people thought the boat sheds would keep them safe. But instead, they became their tombs. And what first struck you about these bones? I'll show you here. A skull of an adult. And it looks as if it's been cut. It's so sharp. Yes. And you see here there are some very clear cut fractures with sharp edges and blackening outside the skull, inside the skull. So all evidence that testified that these people were exposed to very high temperature. High enough to let the bone in brain and the skull to explode. The brains had burst out of the skull? Due to the bite on the brains, then the skull exploded. These skeletons look very different from the body casts in Pompeii. It seems that whatever happened here was the result of a force so hot it reduced these poor people to a scorched pile of bones. And yet, just like Pompeii, larvae was never found in Herculaneum. So why did the same eruption reduce people to skeletons in one place and yet preserve whole bodies just a few kilometres away? I want to take a closer look at the volcano at the heart of this catastrophe, Vesuvius. This is the top of Vesuvius. It's very hard looking around here to think that this mountain caused all that damage. But this sleeping giant wasn't always so peaceful. When this volcano erupted nearly 2,000 years ago, it did so in a way that had never been recorded before. Instead of throwing out lava, it somehow created a wave of intense heat that was strong enough to kill people 11 kilometres away. So what did happen here and why was this eruption so different? Although much of the evidence has been lost in the mists of time, there was a witness to the disaster. A Roman whom we call Pliny the Younger was staying across the Bay of Naples from Vesuvius when it erupted. He wrote down what he saw, and 2,000 years later, his words still hold clues to the events of that day. Half hours after the initial eruption, Vesuvius was still spewing millions of tonnes of ash and debris into the atmosphere. Pliny then described something very unusual. He wrote that a great mass of material broke away from the eruption column and flowed down the sides of the volcano. The fast-moving avalanche of gas and dust spread out across the land and covered everything in its path. Pliny's words were disregarded for centuries, thought to be the product of an overactive imagination. But then in the 1980s, a volcano erupted in North America, and people saw for themselves that Pliny hadn't been exaggerating. Mount St. Helens National Park has some of the most breathtaking scenery in the USA. But on Sunday, May 18, 1980, this peaceful world was transformed when the Mount St. Helens volcano erupted. For nine hours, a vertical eruption column over 24 kilometres high spread half a billion tonnes of ash and debris across three states. When it fell to earth, it covered everything within 600 kilometres in a fine ash. Volcanologists had seen eruptions before, but this was the first time they had managed to capture on film a spectacular phenomenon. If you look at the footage carefully, you can see that the whole north face of Mount St. Helens collapses. As it does, it releases a searing hot avalanche of gas and dust that explodes down the sides of the mountain. This is called a pyroclastic current. Temperatures inside this tidal wave of gas and debris measured 700 degrees Celsius. The turbulent wave of superheated gas travelled at nearly 130 kilometres an hour. It destroyed everything in its path within seconds. You can see the devastation caused by the pyroclastic current over 10 kilometres from the mouth of the volcano. Brittany Brand is a volcanologist who has made an in-depth study of the explosive eruption. She thinks that what happened in North America holds vital clues to what happened here in Italy nearly 2,000 years ago. Could you explain what a pyroclastic current is? A pyroclastic current is an avalanche of searing hot gas, ash and rock that travels down the slopes of a volcano at hundreds of kilometres of an hour. It's impossible to outrun and absolutely deadly. When I think of an eruption, I think of streams of lava coming down a mountain. Well, the style of eruption, whether a volcano will erupt lava or if it will erupt explosively is primarily a function of how much gas is in the magma. If there is no gas in the magma, then the magma will erupt as a lava flow or a lava dome. And that is the actual magma, the liquefied rock that's coming out as lava. Exactly. And in an explosive eruption, the difference is the magma has gas bubbles. And as the gas in the magma makes its way to the surface, the gas bubbles get bigger and bigger and bigger to the point where when the volcano erupts, the gases just expand very quickly and it rips the magma apart into very tiny pieces, which are your ash and your pumice. See, so it's still the same. The pumice and the tiny rocks are still the stuff that would be lava. It's just the gas has split them up. Exactly. The pumice, the ash, they're all bits and pieces of the magma. There was no gas. It would have erupted as a lava flow, but because there was gas, it was pulverized in an explosive eruption. From what scientists witnessed at Mount St. Helens and data gathered from other volcanic eruptions, it's now possible to piece together exactly what happened when Vesuvius erupted. 12 hours after the initial eruption, Vesuvius was still forcing millions of tons of volcanic debris into the air. Both Pompeii and Herculaneum were drowning under a thick blanket of ash and pumice. The people in Herculaneum took refuge in the boat sheds. But the ash fall was nothing compared to what was to come. The eruption column stretched nearly 32 kilometers high. Under its own weight, it was beginning to weaken. And at around 2 a.m., part of the column collapsed. The collapsing column sent a pyroclastic current surging down the sides of the volcano. A turbulent avalanche of superheated gas and dust traveling at hurricane speeds. Temperatures inside the explosive blast were over 500 degrees Celsius. The wave of searing hot gas and ash took less than 5 minutes to strike Herculaneum. The people sheltering in the boat sheds had no idea what was about to happen. The intense heat surge killed them instantly. It vaporized their flesh, and the pressure from inside caused their skulls to burst open. And that is why all that remained of the people in the boat sheds were blackened skeletons and cracked skulls. The people in Pompeii were unaware of the horror wreaked on their neighbors because the pyroclastic current ran out of energy before reaching the city walls. For the moment, it seemed that they were safe, but they would not escape. They would be left not as bones, but as bodies captured in their final moments. Remarkably, despite years of research, there are still clues in Pompeii that were overlooked. This is the Macellum. It was once Pompeii's bustling marketplace, a lively and sometimes smelly focal point for the city's 20,000 inhabitants. It's now the final resting place of two people killed by Vesuvius. For years, people thought that this woman had her arms raised because she was trying to protect herself against an attacker. But recently, forensic scientists have reanalyzed her strange posture, and they now think it holds vital information about how the people in Pompeii died. Peter, does this cast give us any clues as to how this person died? Yes, this attitude is very typical of someone who has been exposed to extreme heat at the moment of death. It appears as if the individual is protecting themselves by lifting their arms up in that way, but it's also very characteristic of the effects of intense heat when they're enveloped in a cloud of very hot ash and gases. Well, that almost looks like the way a boxer defends himself, doesn't it? Yes, it's called a pugilistic attitude by pathologists because when people are caught and die in fires, they can adopt this posture causing the muscles to coagulate and shorten so that the limbs flex and adopt this shape, and then this posture becomes fixed at the time of death. It's very hard to overcome. So this isn't just characteristic of death from a volcanic eruption. It's death from heat. We see this whenever anyone dies from extreme heat. So if this person did die from exposure to intense heat, there must have been more than one pyroclastic current, and one of them must have reached the city of Pompeii. But why are the remains in Pompeii so different from the remains in Herculaneum? The reason is simply down to distance. Pompeii is five kilometers further from Vesuvius than Herculaneum is. So as the wave of heat traveled the extra kilometers, it cooled from 500 degrees to around 300 degrees. This was still hot enough to kill the people instantly, but not hot enough to vaporize their flesh. But this theory raises another question. If you look closely at the casts in Pompeii, you can still see the imprint of the clothes the people were wearing on the day they died. So if the people were struck by a wave of gas over 300 degrees Celsius, why wasn't their clothing destroyed? To find out, I've come to Edinburgh. Here at the university, they have a machine that is capable of recreating a pyroclastic current in the laboratory. Helping us is fire safety engineer Dr. Luke Bisbee. Luke, you know, we've got this puzzle at Pompeii because what seems to have happened is that the people were killed by the heat. But their clothing has remained intact, so we can still see the sandals, we can see the clothes. How can that have happened? One of the reasons we're trying to run this test is to simulate the conditions of what happened to try to understand how it is that the temperature could have been sufficiently high to effectively kill the people instantaneously, and yet the clothing wasn't burned. So Luke, what does this machine do? It's a piece of equipment called a fire propagation apparatus. Basically, we place the sample inside this quartz tube on a table down inside the machine, and we use these very high-powered infrared lamps to impose heat that we can supply to the sample in a very controlled way. The sample of fabric we are using is a type of boiled wool. It's thought to be very similar to the type of material worn by the population of Pompeii. We're wrapping the wool around pieces of pork to replicate the human flesh beneath the cloth. So we're going to simulate what it would have been like for a person being hit by that surge. That's right. What we're trying to do here is simulate a pyroclastic surge moving down the sides of the volcano and over Pompeii at a velocity of about 40 miles an hour and a gas temperature of about 300 degrees Celsius. OK. Well, let's see what happens. The light given off by this machine is powerful enough to blind, so before it fires up, I've got to put on safety glasses. We're going to heat the sample for 150 seconds. Experts think this is the length of time the people of Pompeii were exposed to the pyroclastic current. Right. So let's have a look inside our sample here. So the cloth is a bit charred, isn't it? Yeah. There's some slight discoloration and charring of the cloth, but as you can see, it's still very much intact. And these are predominantly edge effects due to contact with the foil. In any case, it's really the center that we're more interested in. And you can see the cloth there is very well intact. It's phenomenal. And underneath we have the pork flesh. I'll just take it out of the foil here. And you can see there is some slight discoloration and drying to the top of the pork, so it's definitely been heated. And I'll just cut into it here and see if we can see any discoloration. And there is some clear discoloration at the surface here, although not to a very significant depth. You can see that the pork at the top is actually cooked, despite the fact that we don't have any damage to the woolen cloth. So what temperature would the flesh have got to turn out like that? I expect the flesh here got to between 200 and 250 Celsius. Wow. Nobody would have survived that, would they? I think it's probably unlikely. It used to be thought that the victims at Pompeii must have suffocated because if they'd been killed by heat, then their clothing would have been destroyed. But this experiment has shown that a wave of heat at 300 degrees will leave the clothing intact. By bringing all the evidence together, the charred and burnt skeletons in Herculaneum, evidence from Mount St. Helens, the contorted pose of the body cast in Pompeii, and the results of the cloth test in Edinburgh, it's now possible for the very first time to piece together the unique sequence of events that played out when Vesuvius erupted and to reveal exactly how the people in Pompeii died and why their bodies were frozen in time. At 1 a.m. on the second day of the eruption, the people sheltering in Herculaneum had just seconds to live. They were killed by the first pyroclastic current. The people in Pompeii were oblivious to the death and destruction because the first wave of superheated gas ran out of energy far from the city walls. But the eruption was far from over. As time passed, the column continued to weaken. At 2 a.m., it collapsed again. The second pyroclastic current thundered down the sides of the volcano, closely followed by a third. Each surge grew in strength and pushed further and further out, closer and closer to the city of Pompeii. At around dawn, the shower of ash and debris falling onto Pompeii began to ease. And many people who'd fled the city returned to collect their money and valuables, thinking that the worst was over. But this was a cruel deception. At around 7.30 a.m., the column above Vesuvius collapsed again. A fourth pyroclastic current surged down the sides of the volcano. The gas and debris raced over the ground. This time, it did reach Pompeii. So now we know the people of Pompeii didn't suffocate on the ash. They weren't consumed by lava. They were struck down by a wave of intense heat. By the time the eruption was over, Vesuvius had produced six pyroclastic currents. Over time, the ash that covered the bodies hardened, encasing each of the dead in a solid outer shell. As the remaining flesh inside the shell decomposed, it left behind a cavity, a perfect mould of each victim's final position. And this allowed archaeologists to do something extraordinary. When they pumped plaster into the cavities, they created these fascinating casts unlike anything that has been seen before or since. The ash that covered the dead was so fine, it preserved details of their faces and the clothes they wore. And 2,000 years later, it has provided us with the clues to how the people died. I wonder what it was like when the first human cast was produced. It must have been pretty nerve-wracking, chipping away at that rock to see what they'd find. But incredibly exciting when the whole human shape appeared. These casts are the real treasures of Pompeii. They're closely guarded and incredibly fragile. But for the very first time, the authorities have given permission to peer beneath the plaster. Using state-of-the-art digital X-ray technology, we want to recreate the face of a person who died on that fateful day. The cast we have chosen rests inside Pompeii's granary. We want to X-ray this cast because the plaster encasing the skull is extremely thin. Although this is one of the first casts ever created, very little is known about who this person once was. We think it was a male because of the large build. But what he did for a living remains a mystery. We call him the Anonymous Man because we know so little about him. But can we find out what he looked like? To recreate this man's face, we've enlisted Richard Neve. He's an expert on anatomical facial reconstruction. Tell me, how do you work? What are you going to do? Because of the limitations on how we can handle this material, if we can get X-rays of the skull from the front and the side, then from that information, I can rebuild a skull. And you can actually then put flesh on the bones? Effectively, yes. It's a wonderful challenge. It's not been done before. So you're excited at the idea of doing it? Oh, yes, I am indeed. It's all in the bone. It's all information in that skull. Because the skull is encased in plaster, we need to use a digital X-ray machine to see through it. And as a safety precaution, we have to wear lead vests and cordon off the area from the public. Helping us is X-ray technician Stijn Leuk. OK, so we're going to do the left lateral. The handheld X-ray machine sends images directly to a monitor where Richard and I can view them. Bingo. Look. Wow. Gosh. I had no idea that there'd be a whole skull in there. I find that amazing, actually. Look at that. It's like a portrait. I'm hoping that Stijn is going to be able to do some magic so that we can actually see the angle of the jaw, which I think is just there, because it's a whopping great big square one. It's a very masculine sort of skull, isn't it, Stijn? Absolutely. Very strong. It never ceases to amaze me. Well, that's the expert eye, I think. At first, the X-ray machine produces images that are grainy and difficult to read. But we soon start to get pictures that Richard can use. Oh, wow. It's surprising, isn't it, when you look at it like this, just how much you really can see. That's the edge of the skull there, isn't it? Yes. There's the front of the skull, beautifully shown. There's the frontal sinus here. That's the roof of the orbit down there, the roof of the eye socket. There's the nose, the floor of the mouth, the palate, hard palate, and our teeth, upper and lower teeth. So is this good enough to create a reconstruction from? Well, with the other views, yes. From this, we can then create a skull. And having done that, we can create the face and the skull we've made. We spent nearly all day taking X-rays of casts. It's much more difficult than I thought it was going to be, but I think finally we've actually got somewhere. We've got a series of X-rays that Richard can work from, and that's great. Two, three. It's incredible to think that something as destructive as a volcanic eruption could help preserve such fragile remains. The reconstruction team have also been given access to another victim of Vesuvius, this time from the town of Herculaneum. Even though the massive heat surge stripped the people of all traces of their identity, it is possible to recreate the face of one of these individuals because every skull holds detailed information about how a person looked. To reconstruct a face, we have been given unprecedented access to the skull of a young woman who died in one of the boat sheds. She's known as the Belladonna. She's thought to have been a wealthy inhabitant of Herculaneum, a woman who lived a life of luxury and pleasure, a life cut all too short. I'm now holding a 2,000-year-old skull. This is supposed to be a woman's skull, and she's called Belladonna, a beautiful woman. I wonder if we can tell that or if you can tell that. Now we can see from this that it has the features that one would associate with a female skull. You have big eye sockets and big orbits, and it's very symmetrical, and one tends to associate beauty with symmetry. With regular features. Regular features, yes. Well, I should put this on here. Nicely in the center. Okay, let's start this up. To recreate the Belladonna's face, we first need to make a complete scan of her skull. This machine will map the skull in the most exquisite detail, and from this we can print out an exact three-dimensional copy. So now you can see on the screen already the 3-D object. It's like a real object coming out of nothing. Exactly, yes. Richard will then use the 3-D copy as a foundation from which to build the face of this woman. I know this is the skull of someone who lived here 2,000 years ago, and yet I find it very hard to relate that and the fact that she died in the eruption of Vesuvius to a skull that I'm holding in my hands now. It doesn't feel real to me. My time in Pompeii is now coming to an end, and it's been a fascinating experience. I'm hoping that Richard will be able to use his skill and knowledge to show us the faces of two people who died in this terrible tragedy. For the last two months, Richard Neve has been hard at work in his studio in England. Using measurements taken from the X-rays and 3-D scans, he's built skulls for both the Belladonna and the anonymous man, and he's now starting to put flesh on the bones. Slowly, layer upon layer of muscle and soft tissue is built up. Once the eyes are in place, the faces take shape. It's no longer just a blank skull staring at you. This is going to be more and more familiar as time goes by. It's now winter, and Richard and I are back in Italy. Both the reconstructions are finished, and I'm looking forward to coming face to face with two people who lived here 2,000 years ago. The first is the Belladonna. This young woman is thought to have been one of Herculaneum's wealthier citizens, but she died cowering in one of the boatsheds. We have brought her reconstruction to the town where she once lived, Herculaneum. All right, so this is the Belladonna. This is the Belladonna. I'm looking forward to seeing what you've made. Yes, well, you've only seen a skull of her before, haven't you? So this is what we've got. It's a person. She's actually got character. It's surreal. That's all I can say. It's just so real. To think of the skull, and that's the face. When I was holding the skull, I couldn't imagine a person, and now I see her. I find it difficult to relate her face to the skull, but that's because she's alive, and the skull isn't. She's called the Belladonna, and I think she is beautiful, but whether she'd have been a showstopper, difficult to know. I suspect she could well have been in her day. So do you think they'll still call her the Belladonna? I expect so, yes. I certainly became quite attached to her, I have to say. She's not yours now, is she? She's not mine now. No, no, no. I find it very hard when looking at all those skeletons in the boathouses to think these were all individuals, but looking at her and thinking her skull was among those. Yes. She was an individual, and of course they all were, and it brings it much more to life somehow, what happened. This young woman once walked along the narrow streets of Herculaneum. She may even have worshipped here in this temple. I think it's remarkable that Richard has been able to breathe life into something that was just a skull. The second face Richard has reconstructed is of the man who now lies in Pompeii's granary. We call this cast the Anonymous Man, as no clues as to who he was or what he did for a living were ever found on his body. But we do have some idea of how and when he died. We think this man managed to live through the eruption. He may have escaped the worst of the ash fall by hiding inside his home. At around dawn on August 25th, he tried to flee the city, but he didn't get far. At around 7.30 in the morning, he was engulfed by the fourth pyroclastic current. It killed him instantly. We have brought his reconstruction to where his body cast now rests, Pompeii's granary. I wonder what face Richard has been able to put on this mysterious figure. this is what I've been waiting for. Here we are. let's see what you've made. There he is, Margaret. That's amazing. I think that's just amazing. Not what you were expecting. Not what I was expecting at all. And I think it looks so real, so human, and so much, well, it would be more lifelike, but so alive. And thinking that that actually is what the person whose bones are inside that plaster. But it doesn't seem to me really like a real person. Whereas when I see what you've made here, the person comes alive. You can imagine him living here and walking up and down these streets. Here at Pompeii, archaeologists have concentrated on the buildings, the artifacts, the wall paintings, all those things left in the physical record, because we haven't got them left anywhere else. But of course, it was a town for people, and people lived here, and these are the people who died here. It's extraordinary looking into that man's eyes. He seems so human. He's almost alive. And he was just an ordinary man who lived here, but he died in the most extraordinary way. And looking at him, you wonder, what can it have been like for the people who were caught in that eruption? It must have been indescribably awful. I still think it's intrusive standing so close to these casts and looking at them. But they are remarkable. They don't just put a human face on the tragedy here. They've helped to explain how the people actually died. Pompeii has wonderful buildings, baths, theaters, but what makes it special is the story of the people and how their lives were brought to such a dramatic and horrific end. Pompeii still sits in the shadow of the giant Vesuvius. It's erupted over 50 times since this city was destroyed. The last time, in 1944, half a meter of ash fell onto its ancient streets. Vesuvius is still alive, still smoldering, and who knows what the future may bring.