The people residing in Pompeii (Italy) died of suffocation after the eruption Vesuvius in the year 79, not burned or dehydrated as other theories defend. This is clear from the first chemical analysis of the bones of the Pompeii tracings -skeletons of its inhabitants in a plaster mold-, carried out with an innovative technique such as X-ray fluorescence.
The work was carried out by an international team led by the University of Valencia and in which researchers from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) and the Italian Ministry of Culture, and appears published this Wednesday in the magazine ‘PLOS ONE’.
This study is a pioneer in crossing chemical, anthropological, taphonomic and stratigraphic data, and creates a methodology applicable to all traces of the Vesuvius eruption of the year 79.
During the eruption, bodies at Pompeii were covered in ash and pyroclastic materials, which were covered by lava and solidified. With their disappearance were left the bones, some fabrics and the hollow of the bodies among the solidified ashes, the so-called voids.
Since 1860, the archaeologist Joseph Fiorelli he put into practice a method to obtain plaster casts of the victims (the calcos), which reconstruct each body to a real scale in the position in which it died.