Yes and no. The figures you see are plaster casts, not petrified or mummified people. But they are not sculptures either: the plaster was poured into the exact hollow a body left in the ash, and many casts still have real bones and teeth inside.
The Pompeii casts are some of the most photographed human remains on Earth, and some of the most misunderstood. People assume the ash turned the victims to stone. It didn't. What happened is stranger, and the stories we tell about the casts turned out to be less reliable than the casts themselves.
How the casts were made
When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, ash and debris buried people where they fell, then hardened around them. Over the following centuries the bodies decomposed inside that shell, leaving a person-shaped cavity in the rock, sometimes holding the skeleton.
Excavators had been breaking into these hollows for years without realising what they were. In 1863 the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, then in charge of the excavations, had liquid plaster poured into one before digging it out. When the plaster set, it held the shape of the person who had died there: posture, folds of clothing, sometimes the outline of a face.
The technique has been used ever since. Around 104 individuals have been cast, which is a small fraction of the people who died. Animals were cast too, including a dog still wearing its collar.
So is anyone actually inside?
Often, yes. Because plaster was poured into cavities that still contained a skeleton, bones and teeth are embedded in many casts. Scanning projects in recent years have imaged the remains inside, and the skeletons are what made the DNA study below possible. The casts are a mixture: an ancient person's bones held inside a nineteenth-century mould of their body.
What the casts are, at a glance
| Common belief | What's actually true |
|---|---|
| People turned to stone | No. Bodies decayed; plaster filled the hollows |
| They're statues | No. They're moulds of real bodies, often with bones inside |
| Everyone was cast | No. About 104 individuals have been cast |
| The poses show agony | Probably not. Heat can contract muscles after or at death |
| The groupings are families | Not necessarily. DNA contradicted several of those stories |
How did the people of Pompeii die?
Not all at once, and not all in the same way. In the first phase of the eruption, a rain of pumice fell on the city for hours. People who sheltered indoors could be killed when the weight of it brought roofs and walls down on them.
Most of the victims found in the city died later, when pyroclastic surges, fast-moving clouds of superheated gas and ash, swept down from the volcano. Exactly what killed people inside those surges is still argued over. Some researchers emphasise extreme heat causing near-instant death; others point to suffocation from ash and gas. It may well have varied from place to place and person to person.
The clenched, crouched positions many casts show are often read as people in agony. A more likely explanation for at least some of them is that intense heat makes muscles contract, pulling limbs into that shape. It is a reminder to be careful about reading emotions into the poses.
The 2024 DNA study that rewrote the stories
For over a century, guides, books, and exhibitions told stories about particular casts: a mother cradling her child, two sisters embracing, family groups dying together. Those stories were built from the poses, the jewellery, and the positions of the bodies. Nobody could check them.
In November 2024, a team of geneticists and archaeologists published a study in the journal Current Biology that did check. Working on skeletal material from casts undergoing restoration, they extracted ancient DNA and tested sex, family relationships, and ancestry.
The headline result: the adult wearing a gold bracelet and holding a child, long presented as a mother and child, was an unrelated adult male. Other groupings traditionally read as relatives or as women also failed to match the evidence. The researchers' conclusion was that many of the familiar stories had been shaped by modern assumptions about who these people must have been, rather than by the remains themselves.
The DNA also showed a population with diverse ancestry, much of it from the eastern Mediterranean, which fits what we know of Pompeii as a busy, connected Roman town rather than an isolated one.
Why this matters beyond Pompeii
The casts are real evidence. The stories attached to them were, in several cases, guesses that hardened into facts through repetition. That pattern is everywhere in Roman history, and it's exactly why we insist on separating the evidence from the tour-guide version. If you enjoy that kind of correction, our myths piece collects more of them.
A note on the date
The eruption is traditionally dated to 24 August AD 79, based on a manuscript of Pliny the Younger's eyewitness letters. That date is now debated. An inscription in charcoal found at Pompeii in 2018, along with evidence such as autumn fruits and heavier clothing, has persuaded many researchers that the eruption happened later, probably in October. Both dates appear in current books, so neither is simply wrong to cite, but the October case has grown strong.
Sources: Pliny the Younger, Letters 6.16 and 6.20; the Pompeii Archaeological Park on the history of the casts; "Ancient DNA challenges prevailing interpretations of the Pompeii plaster casts," Current Biology, November 2024; standard scholarship on the eruption of Vesuvius. Where researchers still disagree, such as the exact cause of death, the text says so.
One real Roman fact a day
Human-written, source-checked, myth-free, right on your home screen.
