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In 1863 , a man poured liquid plaster into a hole in the ground . The man was Giuseppe Fiorelli . He was an archaeologist working at Pompeii , in southern Italy . The volcano Vesuvius had buried the city in 79 CE . Hot ash fell over everything and hardened like stone . The bodies of the people inside it slowly decayed . They left empty spaces — perfect hollow shapes — inside the solid ash . Fiorelli saw those spaces and had an idea . He poured plaster into the hollow ground and waited . When the plaster dried , he broke away the ash around it . What he found was a person . A person — their exact shape , frozen in their final moment . One figure covers his face with his hands . Another is a small child , curled on the ground . The plaster caught the folds in their clothes . It caught the bend of a knee and the turn of a shoulder . Those figures are still in Pompeii today . Fiorelli did not find bodies . He found the shape that a body leaves behind . That shape carries something a skeleton never can — posture , movement , and a last human second .
