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In a final desperate movement, a dying man raises himself from the floor
and tries to protect his pregnant wife, cupping his hand over her face.
Their five children are dying or dead, four huddled in a group and the baby
alone on the other side of the room. All too quickly, the family succumbs
to the choking fumes spewing from Vesuvius. The fine, grey ash that fills
the air quickly covers the bodies.

Just over 2000 years later, archaeologists have discovered the family.
Preserved now as a mixture of concrete and resin, the little group is a
poignant reminder of the catastrophic eruption that destroyed the towns
and villages around Pompeii in August 79 AD .

Archaeologists and historians have been digging at Pompeii since the
early 18th century. Today they have reached a point where they can paint
an accurate picture of the life this family led. Who they were and what
the part of town they lived in was like; whether they were rich or poor,
shopkeepers or slaves. Reconstructing the whole life of the town seems an
impossible task. After so many years of work by generations of excavators
from many countries, there is just too much information to grasp.

Until a few years ago, much of the data from Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum,
lay in notebooks and files in archives and museums. The shells of the buildings
that make up Pompeii remain in place but many of the objects uncovered in
them were removed long ago. Artefacts ranging from shrines and statues,
jewellery and gold plate and everyday objects such as cups, bottles and
tools, are scattered around the world’s museums.

But wherever the objects are now, most of the information about when
and where they were uncovered is contained in the original notes of the
early excavators. The first step in reconstructing the town is to collect
all the information, electronically replacing the statue in its proper garden,
the bowls and spoons in their owner’s kitchen.

The starting point was the Neapolis project, begun in 1987. Working
with a consortium made up of IBM Italy and Fiat Engineering, the archaeologists
at Pompeii began to learn what they could do with computers. At the heart
of the project is the database, stored in a mainframe computer. A network
of personal computers gives the archaeologists access to the database.

Neapolis became one of the largest information technology projects in
archaeology. Its aim was to capture in the database every piece of information
on each object from every room in every house in the town.

First, the team needed a good map, with not just the outlines of the
excavated buildings, but the contours and features of the whole of the Sarno
Valley that was devastated by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

With digitised aerial photographs, the computer has drawn up accurate
plans of the area. Every piece of data can be linked to the map. This means
that any member of the team can call up the computer image of an object,
such as a fresco, and put it in context – by identifying the wall, the house
and the street it came from.

The computer’s memory is a huge advance on the combined memories of
the thousands of archaeologists who have worked at Pompeii. It is also cheaper
and quicker at its task. ‘It can take a month for a proper cartographer
to draw a plan,’ says Baldassare Conticello, the archaeological superintendent
of Pompeii. ‘It’s easier and cheaper to use the computer. You just press
a button and move from the plan to the archaeology. It’s not improving knowledge,
but organising it.’

The first artefacts to be catalogued in the database were the 12 000
frescoes from the walls of the houses that have been excavated so far. ‘It
is not possible for a single archaeologist or a group of archaeologists
to remember the subject of all the frescoes,’ says Stefano Bruschini of
IBM Italy.

The database now holds every conceivable type of information on every
fresco – which house it is in and how big the painting is, what images it
contains and when they were painted, and the state of preservation. Some
20 000 digital images of frescoes are stored in the database. Images of
the same frescoes from watercolours and engravings made from the 18th century
onwards are also now in digital form, so an archaeologist who wants to study
a particular fresco can look at how it has changed over the centuries since
it was excavated. They can see how its colours have faded and where paint
has flaked.

With all the early notebooks held in the database, the archaeologist
has access to the original descriptions of each fresco. This provides invaluable
information on the painting’s history since it was excavated. All this information
helps the restorers working on frescoes. ‘Before restoring a fresco, you
need to know what has happened to it in the past 50 or 100 years. You need
to know about previous attempts to restore it,’ says Bruschini.

The computer helps in another way. Imaging techniques allow restorers
to fill in the missing parts of a fresco on the screen. They can mix and
match colours with an electronic palette until satisifed that they have
the right combination. ‘Only when everyone agrees on what to do to the painting
do we move to the painting itself,’ says Conticello. It is not only the
colouring that is entrusted to the computer. A fresco may need to be removed
and have a new plaster backing. Every step in the process is worked out
in minute detail before making any move.

On a larger scale, the computer allows exploration and restoration of
the town’s architecture. Applying standard rules of classical architecture
to the remains of a building gives a new approach to restoration. ‘This
often shows up the mistakes of earlier restorers,’ says Conticello.

Computer technology has been particularly good at helping experts to
decipher the charred papyrus manuscripts uncovered at Herculaneum. Computer
enhancement techniques heighten the contrast between the remains of inked
letters and the burnt papyrus, making at least parts of the text readable.

With these tools, it will eventually be possible to construct a detailed
town plan for each of the buried cities and towns. ‘Until now people have
looked at a particular subject – a single house or maybe the bronzeware
from a single ‘insula’. It is difficult to study the whole town because
it is so big, so crowded and so full of artefacts,’ says Bruschini.

In Pompeii, the archaeologists have counted all the religious buildings,
the public buildings and houses, the restaurants and brothels. ‘Mixing geographical
information with information on the artefacts can give us a view of the
commercial and social life of the town,’ says Bruschini.

Looking out from Pompeii, with the map of the Sarno Valley and all its
archaeological finds, Conticello and his team can map the trade routes in
and out of Pompeii. A street with many cheap eating places is a sure sign
that the road was busy with lots of trade. A street of large houses with
rich frescoes, perhaps depicting Venus and Mars, suggests a wealthy residential
avenue. With the map of the area, this information can be extended to show
the links with wealthy villas outside town or a village on a trade route.

Anyone who wants to see how much progress has been made at Pompeii can
take their own electronic tours at the exhibition Rediscovering Pompeii
at the Accademia Italiana in London. The exhibition shows 200 new artefacts
from Pompeii – ranging from frescoes and gold jewellery to carbonised olives
and prunes and parts of Pompeii’s plumbing. But more intriguingly, it allows
visitors the same access to the Pompeiian database as the archaeologists
have. Visitors can take an electronic walk through two rich houses moving
from room to room, calling up images and a mass of information on its frescoes
and mosaics and the artefacts discovered there.

Rediscovering Pompeii is showing at the Accademia Italiana at 24 Rutland
Gate, London SW7 until 21 June. The exhibition is sponsored by IBM.

* * *

Casting around for the perfect shape

Gruesome, poignant or just a piece of history? Whatever effect the bodies
of the Pompeiians have on you, they are an important part of the archaeology
of Pompeii. The Italian archaeologist Guiseppe Fiorelli made the first attempts
at preserving bodies in 1863 by casting them in plaster.

Only victims who were buried in volcanic ash can be cast. Those killed
in the rain of fiery pumice were burned and remain only as skeletons. But
those buried in the fine ash slowly decayed, leaving a hollow with every
fold of cloth imprinted in the hardened ash. Fiorelli poured plaster into
the cavities, revealing somewhat crudely the people of Pompeii in their
final moments.

But plaster is not an ideal material for preserving the bodies. When
it dries, it shrinks, making the Pompeiians appear smaller than they were.
Sometimes, air bubbles spoiled the cast, which had to be touched up by the
restorer, making the bodies in part fake. And plaster decays, making the
casts temporary things.

The London exhibition opens with a cast of a young woman made in 1984
with a new technique. The Lady from Oplontis was fleeing from a villa near
Pompeii, and died wearing her finest jewels and clutching a purseful of
coins. The cast is made from more robust epoxy resin, and reveals her skeleton
within and replicas of her jewellery in position.

This casting technique is more complicated than Fiorelli’s. The restorer
first has to make a cast in wax, surround it with a plaster mould and replace
the wax with resin. Baldassare Conticello, Pompeii’s archaeological superintendent,
has allowed only one such cast to be made: ‘We were obliged to ‘work’ a
little work on the body, and this is incorrect,’ he said.

The family of seven, uncovered last September, are the first to be given
the latest treatment. A mixture of cement and resin with an anti-astringent
to prevent the cement from shrinking is pumped into the hollow at a pressure
of 1 to 2 atmospheres to ensure that the cavity is completely filled.

This produces a cast with a much finer detail than earlier ones, even
down to facial expressions. ‘From an emotional point of view the technique
gives a better result and from a scientific point of view, it is more accurate,’
says Salvatore Ciro Nappo, who made the casts. ‘If this system had been
invented earlier we would have seen all the faces of Pompeii.’

The pressure must be carefully judged so that the mixture does not expand
the cavity, making the body larger. This would also make the cast a fake,
says Conticello.

At Herculaneum, where most of the town still lies buried beneath the
modern town of Ercolano, many bodies await discovery. Some have been located,
but will lie where they are until techniques have been developed still further,
says Ernesto de Carolis, the archaeological director at the site. ‘We won’t
excavate them until we know the best of all possible techniques.’