Stuff You Should Know - How Pompeii Worked

Episode Date: February 13, 2018

What must be one of the most famous natural disasters in history took place when Mt Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE. But when the town was resurrected 1700 years later, a new chapter in its history was written. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, we are going on tour in 2018, and where are we going? On April 4th, we're gonna be in Boston at the Wilbur. You can get tickets at thewilbur.com, Chuck. And then on April 5th, we're gonna be in D.C.

at the Lincoln Theater, and you can get tickets for that at Ticket Fly. That's right, and then we're going to two new cities, right? Yep, on May 22nd, we're gonna be in St. Louis. You can get tickets on Ticketmaster. And on May 23rd, we're gonna be in Cleveland, and you can get tickets there at PlayhouseSquare.org.

And then there's one more, Chuck. That's right, we're gonna wrap it up in Denver, specifically Inglewood, Colorado, at the Gothic Theater on June 28th, and possibly adding a show on the 27th. Stay tuned for that. Yep, and you can get tickets at AXS.com. So come see us live.

We'll have a good time. Come on out. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. ["The Animal House Edition"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry over there. We're all wearing togas, which makes this stuff you should know, the Ancient Roman Edition. Or the Animal House Edition. Yeah, it could be. I'm Bluto. I just saw that movie, that Netflix movie, about Doug Kinney and then Lampoon.

Is it good? Well, the documentary is better. Oh, is this like a biopic? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's a movie movie. I gotcha. Yeah, I judge what I watch on Netflix just based on the illustration or the drawing or the art. And sometimes that's a good rule of thumb

and other times it's not. But that one, I kind of avoided it because of the art. Yeah, I mean, it's not great. I kind of enjoyed it because I like all the people and it's kind of fun seeing someone be Bill Murray and someone be Chevy Chase and John Belushi in a little bit of the making of Animal House and Caddyshack. But ultimately, the documentary's much better.

What's the name of the documentary? A Drunk, Stoned, Brilliant, Dead, or some combination of those words? I'm not sure. Yeah, I've come across that. Yeah, that's really good. But a brilliant and feudal gesture, feudal and stupid gesture.

Yeah, that's right. Is, I give it two stars. I don't know out of how many, though. I've just been steady consuming riff tracks as fast as they'll clear them on Amazon Prime. Oh, really? Yeah. That stuff never gets old.

It really doesn't, it really, really doesn't. All right, Chuck, now that we've gotten our initial tangent, AKA the introduction out of the way. Recommended viewing. Right, let's talk Pompeii. Yeah. Because I mean, that's what we're doing today. And frankly, it's 2018.

We've been doing this for almost a decade now. We're coming up on a decade in a few months. April. Yeah, and this is the first we're doing on Pompeii. And that is just utterly mind-blowing to me. It really is. Considering we've done shows on both volcanoes and supervolcanoes.

Yep. And our show on tiny volcanoes. All right, the littlest volcano. That was so good. It is weird that we're finally getting around to this. Yeah, it really is. Because we've also done the Seven Wonders. We've done tons of archeology stuff.

It's strange. We did one on the real Atlantis. Remember that one? Nope. It was a good one. You should go back and listen to it. Really? Yeah.

Oh, man. Yeah, I was like, oh, Monopoly. We haven't done one on that and looked it up. And yep, we sure have. I do remember that one. I was scouring my brain like, OK, what was this episode like? What did we talk about? Nothing.

It's like it never happened. Yeah. I mean, maybe we should just go back and re-record some of these for our own benefit. No. OK. Reboot our own show. Right.

Just for us. So OK, well, we are finally talking Pompeii. And to do that, we have to go back, the way back machine. And we should probably bring helmets and the dog attack outfits that those trainers wear. Yeah. And also, we need to fuel the way back with olive oil on this trip.

Oh, that's nice. We need to retrofit it because we'll be in big trouble if we don't. Well, let's use the good stuff, like the really high grade stuff, because it burns my throat. I like the mid-grade EVOO. So let's save that for eating. OK.

Use the high test stuff for traveling. Oh, you don't like really good olive oil? No, I don't. I want to say that I do, but I don't. It burns my throat. Huh. Yeah. Like when you just do shots of it?

Yeah. Maybe that's the problem. Shot of olive oil, shot of crankcase oil. That's right. Well, you know what they say. Olive oil before crankcase oil never sicker. Right. No, it's the other.

Oh, god. All right, so we're in the wayback machine. We have our rescue gear. We have our olive oil. It's our dog attack gear. Sure. Why? Because the dog's there?

No, because of the falling pumice and stone that's about to hit the area. Yeah, but I just wondered, because it very famously was a cast of a dog. And there's actually a very famous mosaic that says Cave Canem, which is the wear of dog. Oh, OK. So yeah, there are dogs there.

Well, good thing we got that suit. Yeah, right. And our nice dispositions. Good dog. OK, so we're here. It's pretty nice. It's a very nice area. It's pretty well populated.

This is Pompey itself. And Pompey is one of several towns right around here on the Bay of Naples. And if you look up over here, that giant almost cartoonishly volcanic volcano over there, that's Vesuvius. Yes, looming large. It's like an eight-year-old drew a volcano and put it in Italy at the Bay of Naples, by Naples.

And that's it. That's Vesuvius. It's what's called a stratovolcano. That's right. Well, I guess we should. You can go back and listen to volcanoes from December 2010 or supervolcanoes just last April. But for those of you don't know, a stratovolcano

is sort of, if you think about just the run of the mill traditional volcano in a cartoon where it just pops like a champagne bottle, that's a stratovolcano. Yeah, and it's actually just built up from previous explosions. So the very presence of a stratovolcano indicates that there's been a lot of activity in that area. And it's blown straight up into the air

and then come down and settle down around it, and now you have a new layer. And it just builds up as a cone. And the thing about the stratovolcano is like you said, it pops like a cork. The reason it does that is because the lava that's kind of slowly growing and building up over time has gases that it seeps into the rock, the surrounding rock

that makes up the volcano. And when those gases finally overcome a certain threshold, a pressure threshold, that's when that cork goes off. And it's about to happen because it's either August or September or October 24th, 79 CE. And we're here in Pompeii. Yeah, and we should also mention too, there are other volcanoes around if you look around,

because this is in a unique area of Europe that is called the Campanian Ark. And there are quite a few volcanoes, well, not quite a few, but there are several volcanoes. Vesuvius is obviously the most active and deadly and famous. But what the Campanian Ark is or Campanian is there's a process called subduction where basically a tectonic plate bumps up against another one

and moves down into the mantle beneath the other plate. And that's what's going on here where the African plate is meeting the Eurasian plate. Right, so there's like all that hot molten earth that's kind of bubbling up through that seam. And one of those holes is the volcano that we know is Vesuvius, right? Yes.

Okay, so we got here just in time to look around for a little bit and kind of take in the culture, the area before the volcano. It's very nice. It is very nice. It was like a very wealthy town, but not really an important town as far as the Roman Empire was concerned.

But there was an inordinate amount of wealthy people and those wealthy people were inordinately wealthy. And they spent a lot of money on the town. There's lots of statues everywhere. There's a good number of temples. There's one to Isis. There's one to Jupiter. There's a big amphitheater.

Yeah. And a big theater as well, two separate things. Yeah, there's one that holds 20,000 people, which at its peak, that's how many people lived in Pompeii. Yeah. Which is a very democratic thing to do, to say that, hey, we're gonna host a show here and we want everyone to be able to come.

Right, and that's pretty cool that they did do that because there's a pretty mixed population in Pompeii at the time, Pompeii and suburban Pompeii, which included Herculaneum, Stabia, and what was the other one, Chuck? There's Pilotsus, Pilotsus, Apollonus. Okay. Okay, so there's a string of towns,

but Pompeii is definitely the biggest of all of them and that's kind of like the center of the area, right? But there's a lot of different people, a lot of different type of people who were kind of gravitated toward Pompeii. It was like a cosmopolitan area, right? So you had wealthy people, you had poor people, you had people from different areas.

That's right. It was also kind of unique for its time in that it was a bit of a resort town. So wealthy people, all around Italy actually, some of them would have, I guess what you would call it now would be a vacation home. Yeah.

And that kind of got me down a rabbit hole of vacationing. Like when did that actually begin? Cause I had no idea that the people of ancient Italy vacationed. Yeah. But apparently it's a thing even Nero is said to maybe have had a place at Pompeii. And I guess it's just, you know,

the weather here is lovely. There's wine and olive oil everywhere. Like I said, that big theater, they built that and said one day Pink Floyd shall play here. Man, I watched that Echoes video like 10 times while I was researching this. It's pretty cool.

For those of you who don't know, Pink Floyd did a very famous live concert. Well, not a live concert. Concert for no one. A live performance in front of whatever, 15 crew people that were filming it. Yeah. In the middle of the amphitheater at Pompeii.

Yeah. It's a little trippy. Yeah. Just a tad. But then David Gilmore a couple of years ago, I think in 2016 did a show there with actual people there. And it was the first like attended concert event there since, you know, the volcano incident. That's really cool. Since the VI.

Yeah. But in that also as we'll kind of see in a little while, that really gives away like just how accessible Pompeii is, the excavated ruin city. That you could go see a David Gilmore concert there. Like I said, wine and olive oil was kind of one of the main trades, but it was just a very rich farmland area

because that volcanic soil is so rich in nutrients. And they were right there by the water with the Sarno River and then right there on the bay. And they just like life, living life there was pretty good. And even the slaves apparently could earn money and potentially even buy their freedom, which was pretty unusual. I have to say also, you mean I went to Pompeii

as I told you and I can attest about that farmland and the fertility of it. They have lemons, no joke, the size of your head. Like they look like you shouldn't stand too close to them. What do you even do with that much lemon? I don't know. I mean, make lemonade, I guess, if you're an optimist. Yeah, but it's just like you get one lemon

and you've really got 14 lemons? Pretty much. I think you just slowly but surely cut away at it, squeeze it into your face, pick up another piece, do it again. Gotcha. Should we take a break? I think that we weren't ready for a break yet until that last joke and now we are, so yeah.

All right, we'll be back right after this and talk a little bit about the VI. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen to it and also we'll never, ever have to say, bye, by bye. Listen to Frost Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. MUSIC All right, Chuck. What is the VI? The volcano internet. Oh, okay. I didn't realize it had been abbreviated.

big one. That's a good one too. So let's go with the, let's go with the BO. Okay. So Pompeii, it's this nice thriving city of 20,000. It's a resort area too. And I guess the morning of August 24th, and we should say that date is actually up for debate. And I guess we'll talk about it a little more later, but we're going with August 24th because that's the date that's still in use. There was a rumble from Vesuvius. There was an earthquake in the area enough to like get everybody's attention. But supposedly that wasn't a very infrequent occurrence that that Vesuvius caused earthquakes pretty, pretty frequently in the region. And it wasn't a big cause of panic. Yeah. Like one reason so many people died is I think because they were used to that kind of

activity. And they were like, no big deal. We're used to the earth moving under our feet. No reason to flee the town. Right. There have been a pretty substantial earthquake 16 years before and I think 63 CE where they had to reconstruct a lot of stuff. Like entire temples and things have been knocked down. So I'm sure they were like, that's nothing compared to old 63. The quake is 63. Yeah. Yeah. And they also, they weren't panicked because they, the previous eruptions, no one really knew about. There were no records of those. There wasn't even, they didn't even say volcano. There wasn't a word for volcano. Right. So it wasn't really on their radar as, hey, this thing has happened before on a grand scale.

They were just kind of enjoying their life. Yeah. There weren't cartoons back then to be like, that's a cartoonishly volcanic volcano. That's right. So they, that's kind of ironic too that they didn't realize that there was a long history of volcanic activity there because it turns out that modern volcanologists and geologists and archeologists are pretty sure that there are plenty of human settlements that were covered over by the volcano and that by the time Pompeii was built, it was built atop these old settlements that have been covered over. So it's like, lost city thanks to the volcano. Everybody forgets somebody's like, oh, this is a nice area. We'll come build here covered over by volcano. Everybody forgets in the cycle repeats again. And that's

where Pompeii found itself by 79 CE. That's right. And so on this day, the earth rumbles. And I want to direct you to this really great website called Open Culture and just search destruction of Pompeii Open Culture. And they have a video. It's like eight minutes long, which is basically like a, it's like they placed a camera in the CGI world of Pompeii, just entrained it on Vesuvius and left it running for 24 hours. And it really gets to point across of how destructive this event would have been. Yeah, I think we, I think you shouted that very same thing out on super volcanoes. Had to have. It's a really cool video. Have you seen it yet? Yeah, I saw it after you shouted it out. Yeah, I watched it again this morning. And I think just

from researching all of this stuff, it really drove it home even more. It was kind of unsettling to watch this time, you know? For sure. So a little afternoon on the 24th is when this, when this, when the champagne cork popped. And they were not ready for this, like we said, just because of all the aforementioned reasons. And the only account, or one of the only accounts we have is we've talked about Pliny the Elder and his nephew Pliny the Younger before. They were not there. They were in Myseum, which is not too far away. It was on the northwestern edge of the Bay of Naples. But that's where Pliny the Elder was stationed. And then Pliny the Younger and his mom were there as well. And apparently when this started to go

down, Pliny the Elder got a message from a friend saying, Hey, can you come and get me? It's going down. And he took off to go. And Pliny the Younger was like, No, I'm going to stay here. Yeah, which was a pretty smart move. Yeah. And how do you pronounce that town? I never tried. Myseum? Myseum. Is that right? Okay. So he and his mom were there. And it's not really close. I mean, as far as like Pompey is concerned, Pompey is way closer to Vesuvius than Myseum is. But they still had an extremely harrowing experience there on Myseum too, just from the fallout from Vesuvius. Even though Pompey and Herculaneum and Stabia all got the worst of it, Pliny the Younger's account, it's the only first hand account of the eruption of Vesuvius then. It's pretty scary stuff. Like he

says, like the sky went dark, but not dark, like the moon wasn't out or there weren't any stars. He said it suddenly got dark, like somebody put a light out in an enclosed room, like that kind of dark, like apparently you couldn't see people just a few feet ahead of you. They just got real dark real fast. Yeah, and you can you can read his entire account online. But here's another nice pull quote. You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants and the shouting of men. There were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagine there were no gods left and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness forevermore. It's pretty grim. Jeez. So this is again in Mysynium. I think I'm not saying that

right still. Mysynium. In Pompeii, the situation is much, much, much worse. And Pliny the Younger was saying that they were kind of huddled in I think a house or something somewhere. But even in this house, the ash that was like accumulating around them and on top of them was so much that they had to stand up every once in a while and shake it off. It was again much worse in Pompeii itself. So there's a lot of ash falling and covering people inside their houses and under structures. And either you stay there and start to worry about getting buried, or even worse, you start to worry about the roof collapsing under the weight of all that gathering ash and pumice. Or you risk going out and being hit by one of those pumice rocks, which if you've ever

picked up a volcanic rock, it is way lighter because it's very porous, way lighter than like a sedimentary rock of the same size. But you still wouldn't want to get hit in the head by one of those things after it's falling 20 miles out of the sky. And this is actually what they think the height that this ejecta coming out of the volcano reached was 20 miles or something like 32 kilometers, I think. Yeah, so here's a couple of stats for you. Ash was falling at a rate of about six inches an hour, which is, you know, if you imagine that as rain, and if you've ever seen a rain like that, that's an unbelievable amount of rain. So imagine that as ash. Lava was flowing at about 68 miles an hour by the time it started sailing down the hillside. Right, right.

So you've got a few things. You've got the first explosion, the eruption, where like you said the court goes off, the ejecta goes into the air. Pliny described it as like a great pine tree with the big long trunk and then way up high, it branches out. And those are now called Pliny interruptions. And then later on, from all this activity, the cone of the volcano collapses. And when that happened, it shot out this pyroclastic flow, which is made up of ash and hot gas from between I think I saw 400 to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a substantial amount in Celsius too. That's the translation. And it's like you said, flowing, I saw 100 miles an hour. You saw 63 miles an hour. 68. But I mean, that's one of those things that I'm sure,

you know, they can't really tell exactly. But at any rate, it's going to be super fast. Super fast, super hot. And they think now, before they thought that everybody in Pompeii died from being covered in ash, they think now that they actually died much more quickly than that. Right when that pyroclastic flow was anywhere near them, especially when it overtook them, it would have killed them instantly, which actually is we'll see accounts for some of the faces that we've been found around on the people of the Pompeii victims. Yeah. And they even think, and by the way, we went right past the fact that pyroclastic flow is a great, great band name. It really is. But they even think now that most of them

died from head injuries even before that even happened. Oh, really? I hadn't seen that one. Yeah. Well, we'll get to that. I'll just throw that out. There's a tease. Okay. So this is shortly after midnight is when Herculaneum was covered and obliterated about 6.30 a.m. The following morning is when Pompeii started getting hit with this flow. The whole thing takes about 25 hours for all for about 200 and plus square miles to get completely destroyed. Yeah. And it in 19 hours, it shot out something like one cubic mile of rock and ash out of that volcano. A cubic mile. Imagine looking up and seeing a mile cube and it's just all coming down on you. Well, and again, seeing this and not like not even knowing what a volcano is.

Right. Yeah. It makes it any scarier, I guess, but they must have thought the world was ending. Well, yeah. I mean, if they thought there were no more gods, I would guess that that they would think like, well, this is it. This is the end of Millhouse. Pliny the Younger too wrote about the water, the sea retreating as it pushed by the earthquakes. And so the thought now is that it also caused a tsunami at the climax of this eruption. So now imagine, you know, the Bay of Naples flowing inland while all of this destruction is raining down around you. Right. Yeah. And then you definitely think the world was ending. And there's actually, there's a very famous beach at Herculaneum where there's a lot of,

there were a lot of bodies found and there's a 30 foot boat that was just kind of like jammed up against them. And I guess that would have been from the tsunami. It would have brought it in. Well, and that's apparently just to finish up with Pliny the Elder. He did, initially, he was going to go out in a big boat and kind of just get a better look at what was going on. But when he got this message from his friend saying, Hey, come rescue us, he got in a fast boat, a fast sailing cutter. And which is probably was his end because by the time they got there, the winds were blowing in a weird direction, apparently, the way they usually blow it would have blown a lot of this out to sea. But unusually it was

blowing in a in the opposite direction that day. So a lot of things kind of came together for, you know, the worst possible scenario. But so Pliny the Elder gets nearby. I think they landed at Pompaneanus. I think it was at Stabia. Oh, where Pliny the Elder landed? Yeah, his friend was Pompanius. Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry. That was who's going to rescue and Pompanius was at Stabia. Correct. This little super ultra wealthy resort area. Yeah, so they couldn't get out of there basically because of their I think their boat was so light and they kept pushing them back in. And apparently said, Hey, let's ride it out here. That's our only choice. And he was he basically died. They couldn't get him up. And the theory for a while is that he died of inhaling toxic fumes.

But now modern historians and scientists are saying, No, he was fat and kind of old and out of shape. And he died of a heart attack. Yeah, I think the consensus among historians today is that he was Boss Hog-esque. Yes. Good way to put it. Yeah. So that's a that's a not a good end for Pliny the Elder. But that's kind of cool to be able to say like, Yeah, I died at Pompeii. Is it? I was a super famous dude in the Roman world. And where did I find my end? Pompeii, another famous thing in the Roman world. That's how you'd say that kind of thing. Yeah, I think it's neat. So Pliny the Elder died. Pliny the Younger lived though. And we know about all of this because again, he was an eyewitness. He was also a historian, a statesman, just just all around smart dude. But he didn't write his

his letter to Tacitus, the historian, for like 27 years after the fact. Yeah, it's a little weird. And so yeah, I don't know if he just heard Tacitus was getting a history together and he wanted to contribute or what what the what the difference was or what the deal was with the gap. But there is a lot of there's a lot of disagreement about whether his date of August 24th is the correct one. Yeah. The reason everyone says August 24th is because he wrote that in the letter. He said that this happened on August 24th. The thing is, apparently there were other drafts of his letter, that same letter, that either didn't give the date or gave a different date later on, I think of November 24th. And then there's a lot of actual circumstantial evidence that suggests that this actually took

place either on October 24th or November 24th rather than August 24th. So there's things like there was there was a just an inordinate amount of pomegranates and figs and nuts found around the town, which would suggest that the harvest had just happened, the autumn harvest, which you wouldn't have done in August. There was a coin that that had a title of Caesar that wasn't bestowed until September of 79. So that coin, yeah, that coin shouldn't have existed. There's there's all this evidence that's coming together that says no, this actually probably was either October or November, but it's just been August 24th for so long now that it's going to be another 10, 20 years before everybody's like, Oh, it happened in October and November. Yeah. And truth be told, that's

sort of one of those things that wonky archaeologists would argue over. I hear it and I think what's a couple of months really, you know, but I just think it's it's it's really fascinating that that they they found a coin and they said, Okay, this coin shouldn't exist. And the reason why is because because there was there was a like Britain was conquered by the Romans a little around like around that time. And so they minted a coin to honor that. And because that coin shows up in Pompeii, we can date when Vesuvius erupted more accurately. That to me is is just eye popping, like you can see, like in my eyes, good old fashioned police work. So either one. So Vesuvius is spoken. Pompeii is now gone. It's covered in something like, I believe,

10 meters, like about 30 feet of ash and pumice. Yeah, I've seen all kinds of anywhere from like eight to 30 feet. So a lot of feet. So it's covered up a lot. And I don't know if we said this or not, but of the 20,000 people, about 18,000 of those residents left when there was the first sign of trouble. Because again, Vesuvius gave plenty of warning. But there were about 2000 people in the town of Pompeii itself when Vesuvius went off and covered the town. But now it's everything's calm. It's quiet. Vesuvius is quiet again. And Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabia, Aplanis, they're gone. Yeah. And I think about 20 to 25,000 total people in the region died is what I saw. Oh, really? That many, huh? Yeah. Among that, you know, the 200 square miles.

So the whole area has just been radically changed. And these cities were so lost that even the people who stayed in the area and continued to live there, they lost track of exactly where Pompeii was. And they stopped talking about it eventually. There's another city named Pompeii that was founded many, many years later. That's the modern Pompeii. And if they ever even reference Pompeii, they just called it La Civita, the city. And they just knew that there was a lost city somewhere in the area. And that's how things stayed for about the next 1700 years. That's right. And you want to take a break? Yes. All right, well, we'll get into the discovery of Pompeii after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of

the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends paper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival

the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh,

man. And so my husband Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, dude, we're back. That's right. So what we've got here as far as Roman history, pre Pompeii and post Pompeii is they've focused a lot on what they would call the important people of society. So military stuff,

wealthy people, political stuff. They didn't say like, Hey, maybe be valuable to record what it's like for everyday people of Rome, because they didn't care. That's why Pompeii and the rediscovery and the excavation over the years has been so important is because all of these a lot of these people in the shops and all the homes and the art were really well preserved. Once they started digging into this stuff, which was a pretty remarkable find and continues to be. Yeah, plus Rome was around for so long. It has been around for so long that it evolved. Right. So over time, what Rome once was culturally, historically is kind of lost and replaced as the culture itself evolves in ages. And apparently it grew more and more conservative the longer it was around.

And one of the things that Pompeii also gives us is the snapshot of Roman culture before it became conservative. And it was hyper sexual at the time when Pompeii was covered over. So that was another thing because at the time until Pompeii was discovered, everyone considered Rome, ancient Rome as this very stayed conservative civilization. And then they started to discover this stuff from Pompeii and we're like, whoa, what were these people into back then? Yeah, there was a lot of highly erotic art. Yeah, I saw a statue of the god Pan having graphic sex with a goat. Like a pretty, pretty realistic statue. And they found that they dug that out of Pompeii pretty early on. And there's phalluses they found everywhere. Some people put phalluses on their

houses, like sticking out into the street. There was Priapis, which is a lesser god who was extraordinarily unsettlingly well endowed. There was just a lot of fertility stuff and a lot of just explicit sexuality in their in their artwork back then. And Rome eventually moved on past that and it had been forgotten until Pompeii gave up its secrets. Yeah, so kind of immediately afterward up until about the 1700s throughout. And like I said, like you said, it was kind of forgotten for a little while. But during this whole long period of time, Pompeii was kind of essentially rated again and again by either people hunting for valuables or kings and queens who wanted to plunder things, you know, like statues and stuff for

their own palaces. And this sort of happened again and again throughout history until about the 1800s when like legit archaeology really started to happen where they could go in there with the name and actually preserving some of this stuff. Yeah, I think the earliest ones were the King, the Bourbon King Charles III, who it was discovered under his watch in 1748. And then the French came into the area. And by this time, they were crazy about archaeology, thanks to their fascination with Egypt. So they brought in some pretty good practices. But even still, I mean, compared to what archaeologists know and do today, this is pretty hokey basic backward archaeological methodology. Yeah, like even when they started to do it right, they just weren't

as advanced as we are today. But things kind of changed for the better. When a man named Giuseppe Fiorelli came along in 1860 and he said, Hey, I'm in charge now. I'm going to get in here and try and do it right. I'm going to be way more careful. My team is going to be more careful. We're going to record all the positions of people, everything that we find. And that's when it that's when it really legitimized kind of what was going on as far as excavation goes. And he also made his name most famously for what ended up being named after him. The Fiorelli process is when he saw these, you know, everything's covered in ash and hardened. So they had they were basically encased in these, you know, over the years, the bodies would rot away. And so they were encased in these hollow

cavities, the people were and dogs and, you know, all sorts of animals. So he said, Why don't we inject this Gesso this plaster into these cavities and see what we come up with. And what he came up with very famously were were the, well, or the people of Pompeii, like more than 1000 of them. Yeah, do you remember our Moldorama episode that just came out? I do remember that. So when these people were covered in that ash and their bodies rotted away, it left what is effectively a mold and he filled it with that that plaster and made plaster casts of them, right? And apparently really detailed ones. I saw them, but I didn't see anything as detailed as like Ed points out that you can see like the design somebody had shaved into their pubic hair.

That's pretty, pretty detailed plaster cast of a dead person from 2000 years ago. There was a, you can very famously see a man like Agony on a man's face, like it like he was just captured at the moment of death, just basically flash frozen a lot like Han Solo and Carbonite. Yeah, it was a huge, huge find and it just kind of shook the world and reproductions and photos of all these casts became the sensation of the day all over the world. Like I said, there's a very famous one of a dog kind of writhing in pain on his back. It's one of the more sad ones. It looked like he had a collar on too. Yeah, he did, which is interesting. Although then I've later seen where that might have been a fake, which I don't fully understand. Yeah, I hadn't seen that

at all because there were no bones inside of it. So they're not quite sure about that one. But there are just some really sad ones of like what is clearly a mother like holding her child, families and couples and embrace and like horrific embrace. And it's just really kind of sad to look through these photos. And they kept finding them like all over the place. They were just groups of people huddled when they would excavate a house. They would find bodies quite frequently. And like you said, like in that, that those embraces just caught in their last moment, like their literal last moment was just caught in time. So it was quite a find. And like you said, it really definitely caught the imagination of the rest of the world. So much so that there was like a Greek

neoclassical revival in the Enlightenment period because everyone had Pompeii fever when it was discovered. Pompeii fever. Pompeii fever. Catch it. So a couple of years ago, I guess a few years ago now in 2015, a group did CT scans on some of these casts, about I think 30 or 40 of them, and that dog and that boar. And they this provided just a lot more detail of so if like you can look at the cast and then look at the CT scan and it kind of brings it to life. And they found it revealed a few really interesting things. One is that the people of Pompeii had almost perfect teeth. Oh, really? Which had been really unusual at the time. And they they think it's because they ate a lot of fruits and vegetables, very little sugar, and that the water was heavily fluoridated.

So they all had really like nice straight teeth. And then what I was talking about the head injuries, this is there's an article in the Atlantic called how the people of Pompeii really died. And almost all of these CT scans revealed that they had head injuries from getting, you know, smashed in the head from this volcanic rock. Man, what a way to go. Yeah. Although I guess it'd be quick, right? Well, either way, if it's that or if it's what you were saying, it's not the slow suffocating death that they used to think it was. Yeah, which is way better. Yeah. I saw also check there was an excavation of like a latrine, I guess, and just a normal housing block where poor people or middle class workers would have lived. And they found evidence of

really great diets. And they think that the people of Pompeii, the rich people actually probably ate a little worse because they ate slightly richer food. But everyone there, including the lower classes were very well-fed on very healthy foods, basically like the Mediterranean diet like you think of today. And that they were also taller on average than the citizens of the area today. Interesting. Yeah, it's usually the exact opposite if you think about it. You know, George Washington, four feet tall. Everybody knows that. They also found in some of the, I think, the runoff into the drainage systems or something. They found, you know, you were talking about the rich people eating more exotic meats. They found evidence that they ate sea urchin.

So I'll give them that because people eat that. Sure. Flamingo. Hadn't seen that one. I know it's coming then. Giraffe. Yeah. Who looks at a giraffe and says, I wonder what that tastes like? And then does it, follows through on it. I don't know. It's the following through part that really knocks my socks off. Yeah. So those are some recent excavations, right? Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that has come out with things like DNA analysis. Okay. So this is extraordinarily new as far as Pompeii goes. Pompeii, it's really cool because it's got its ancient history when it was covered over by Vesuvius, but then it also has a secondary history of its discovery and then its excavation since then. And apparently it's the longest continuously excavated site in the world

as far as archaeology goes. And he's one of the largest too. I wouldn't be surprised. It is extraordinarily big. And the fact that it's been around for so long, it's been excavated for so long. It was basically there when archaeology was born. Archaeological techniques that have been developed over the age have all been tried and tested and frequently discarded at Pompeii. And as a result, a lot of those early ones that were just not very smart have actually had a, they've had a pretty tough effect on the town, like the frescoes. They discovered frescoes, which are paintings on plaster walls all over the town. Most houses had really beautiful frescoes. And the workers were like, these are going to flake off. This is back in the 1920s.

So we need to do something. So they covered them in paraffin wax, which I guess it makes sense. It's covered in wax. We can figure out what to do with it later. Maybe we never will, but you can still kind of see through it. The problem is that the pigments bonded to the wax, not just rubbed off like molecularly bonded with the wax. And then as water grew behind the walls and seeped through the walls behind the painting, it pushed the painting off the walls onto the wax. So now if you want to get this wax off, they finally developed a technique where you can use a laser that just removes the wax and leaves the pigment. But that's extraordinarily new too. I think just in the last couple of years, they started using that. Before then they would do

things like use gasoline and stuff to get the wax off. And it would just take the fresco clean off. Yeah, I'm surprised there's anything left between being continually raided, earthquake since then, World War II since then, vandals, tourists, rainwater. It's just like it's been just beaten up for a couple of thousand years now. But you've been there. There's still a lot of stuff there. Yeah, there is. I think they've uncovered two thirds of it, they think. Yeah. And so they've gotten to this point now where they're like, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. I think in the 1990s, whoever was the director of archaeology at Pompeii said,

we need to stop excavating. We're going to leave the what's left for later generations who have better techniques to uncover. And we're going to focus on preserving what's here now, which is a big deal because it's a World Heritage site. And UNESCO basically came in in 2013 and they effectively condemned it. Like what a city would do to a building that was falling down. That's what UNESCO did to the Pompeii site. They said, this thing is toast. They put it on the in danger list. And one of the big reasons is tourists. When you're there, you're like, are you sure I'm allowed to be sitting on this thing and taking a funny picture? Or I'm really allowed to walk through here. They let you go almost everywhere on that site,

touch everything, run around. It's just like a big playground, basically. And you have to stop and remind yourself, wait, this is an archaeological site in operation still. And the fact that tourists have been allowed to do that for so long has had a huge effect on the deterioration of the site itself, too. Yeah. Well, not only that, but it's been corrupt over the years, the management of these ruins. A lot of the structures have collapsed over time, completely and gone away. And then finally, in 2012, the EU and the Italian government finally got together and said, listen, we need to really reinvest in this find here. And it's called the Great Pompeii Project. And they invested about 105 million euros to try and repair and preserve what they have left.

I'm surprised they haven't closed down more parts of it, because like you said, you can still go everywhere. But what they have done is restored a lot of these frescoes and mosaics, like you were saying. A lot of the best work has been done in the last five years. Yeah, easily. To try and get this thing preserved as much as they can at this point. Yeah. And one of the things that got them going was the gladiator school, which is a pretty big structure that housed the gladiators where they trained in town. And it crumbled. It fell. It turned into ruins because it had gotten eroded, I think, by drainage. And one of the things they're figuring out now is that there was a pretty decent sewer system underneath these towns, but that pyroclastic flow covered it all up. So

the water has nowhere to go, but over the ruins and over the last 150 years, it's eroded some of these buildings. That's another thing they're dealing with, too. Yeah. I don't know if you said enough of the Herculaneum Conservation Project. Did you mention that? The Great Pompeii or the Herculaneum? The Herculaneum. No. So there's a model for dealing with these sites to preserve these sites. And it's in Herculaneum. It was apparently worse off than Pompeii for a long time. And a public-private partnership took control of the thing. And now it's like the model of how to rescue sites like this. So it's possible that Pompeii project will be successful. And in 20 years, there will probably be walkways everywhere that are raised above ground, and you won't be able to

touch anything. I would guess if you want to be able to touch Pompeii, you should go in the next few years, because I don't think they're going to keep allowing that for much longer. If you want to touch Pompeii. If you want to touch it. You got anything else? Nope. Well, that's Pompeii, man, when we did it finally. That's right. Okay. Well, if you want to touch Pompeii, you should go to Pompeii. And in the meantime, while you're waiting to do that, you should type Pompeii into the search about howstuffworks.com, which will bring up this great article by the Grabster. And since I said Grabster, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this artifacts and monuments from Germany. Hey guys, just finished the episode on public monument removal. And it was fantastic,

as usual. It made me think of the monument removal in other parts of the world, in particular in Germany. It comes to mind because I studied German all through high school and college. Did a study abroad there for a summer. The way Germans treat their Nazi history is different. I'm by no means an expert. But as I understand it, they do everything in their power to prevent their citizens from idolizing or idealizing Nazi Germany. You can't buy Mein Kampf, which I think that's true, didn't it? I think so. There are no statues or monuments of any kind. They're not sanitizing their history or pretending it didn't happen, but they don't want to commemorate it either. Anyway, in honor of today being the day the Berlin Wall has been gone, longer than it was

up, I'd like to recommend that you see the movie Goodbye Linen. If you haven't never seen it, it's great. It takes place when the Berlin Wall comes down in the first year or so after during German reunification. Funny and thoughtful and sad and just really, really good. It's one of my favorite movies and no spoilers, but it has my favorite scene ever of a monument being removed. And I looked it up. It was, I think it was nominated for Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and a host of other like BAFTAs and European awards. So it looks pretty good. Look forward to the new episodes. And that is from Ellie. Nice. Thanks a lot, Ellie. Appreciate that email. Very thoughtful. I don't think Germany was even allowed to have a flag for a while. You're not mistaken. Yeah. All right.

Well, that's it. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh on Clark and at SYSK podcast. Chucks at facebook.com slash stuff you should know and slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack

and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the

iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.