Mount Vesuvius Research Paper

1872 Words8 Pages
DEMONSTRATE UNDERSTANDING OF A SIGNIFICANT EVENT IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD In the year 79 AD, a mountain in Italy called Mount Vesuvius erupted, the eruption is one of the most catastrophic and famous of all time. Surrounding Roman cites; Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were two densely populated towns located in the Bay of Naples were obliterated by the eruption. It is not known how many people the eruption killed. LOCATION OF THE AREAS AFFECTED BY THE ERUPTON This map shows the cities surrounding Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, Stabiae, Oplontis and Herculaneum which were all destroyed during the eruption. This map also shows the area of the smoke plume from the eruption. Herculaneum is situated approximately 7 kilometres to the west of Mount Vesuvius, whereas Pompeii was approximately 9 kilometres to the south. SIGNIFICANCE IN PRESERVING EVIDENCE OF EVERYDAY ROMAN LIFE The eruption of Mount Vesuvius took citizens by surprise, no one knew the danger of the eruption, some…show more content…
eruption of Vesuvius is the large number of holes found in the volcanic deposits around Pompeii that represented corpses of people and animals that were buried by the hot ash. Giuseppi Fiorelli developed the use of plaster casts to recreate the forms of plants, animals and human bodies.' The process is now named after him: the Fiorelli process. He realised that where a corpse had been buried in ash, it had rotted over time and a cavity remained. Whenever an excavator discovered a cavity, plaster of Paris was poured in and left to harden. The ash around the plaster was then carefully removed, so that a plaster replica of a person at the moment of their death remained. This process gave information about how people had died in the eruption, what they were doing in their final moments and what sort of clothing they wore, the detail helped to develop historians ideas on the relationships between Roman people, the rich, the poor and the

More about Mount Vesuvius Research Paper

Open Document