The Pompeii body casts: how they were made and what we now know

Short answer: the casts are not bodies turned to stone. The ash that buried Pompeii in 79 AD hardened around the dead; as the bodies decayed they left hollows, and in 1863 the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli began filling those hollows with plaster. The skeletons are still inside. In 2024 a DNA study showed that several of the stories told about them for over a century were wrong.

How the casts were made

Most victims in Pompeii were not killed by falling ash but by the pyroclastic surges that came later: avalanches of hot gas and ash that ran through the streets. The fine material settled around the bodies and set hard. Over time the flesh decayed and left an exact hollow in the deposit, with the bones lying loose inside.

Fiorelli’s idea was to find such a hollow, pierce it, pour in liquid plaster and dig the deposit away once it had set. What came out was the shape of a person at the moment of death — folds of clothing, sandal straps, the line of a face — with their own skeleton embedded in the plaster. Later excavators refined the method, and some recent casts have been made with transparent resin.

Why the poses look the way they do

Many casts have bent arms and legs, which is often read as people shielding themselves. Some were. But extreme heat also contracts muscles and pulls limbs into a crouch after death, so a pose is not always a final gesture. Hands over the face, however, appear again and again.

What the DNA study changed

In 2024 a team led from the University of Florence, with geneticists from Harvard and the Max Planck Institute, extracted DNA from bone fragments inside several casts and published the results in Current Biology. Some of the best-known stories did not survive:

• In the House of the Golden Bracelet, an adult holding a child had long been described as a mother. The adult was a man, and not related to the child.
• A pair thought to be a mother and daughter, or sisters, embracing, included at least one man.
• The people sampled had mostly eastern Mediterranean ancestry, a reminder that Pompeii was a cosmopolitan port town.

The study also confirmed what conservators suspected: some casts were reshaped by restorers in the past, with bones removed and metal rods added. The casts are evidence, but they have been handled.

How many died

Nobody knows the full number. The remains of well over a thousand people have been found in Pompeii, and a third of the city is still unexcavated. Many inhabitants did leave during the first phase of the eruption; the people in the casts are mostly those who stayed, sheltered or tried to leave too late. New finds still happen — in 2020 two men were cast in a villa at Civita Giuliana, just outside the city.

Where to see them

• The Garden of the Fugitives, near the Nocera Gate: thirteen people who died together, the largest group and the most affecting place in Pompeii.
• The Forum Granaries: casts behind metal grilles among amphorae and storeroom finds, including the chained dog.
• The Antiquarium near Porta Marina: casts of people and animals at the end of the museum’s rooms.
• Single casts also turn up elsewhere on the site, sometimes in houses, sometimes moved for exhibitions.

A word on visiting

These are human remains. Photography is allowed and nobody will stop you, but most people find that the casts in the Garden of the Fugitives ask for a moment of quiet more than a photo. If you are visiting with children, it is worth deciding in advance whether and how to go.

Updated 2026-10-27