Ok, sliding in to ask about your thoughts on human remains displayed at Pompeii, as you mentioned! I’m super interested in the ethics, intent and design behind exhibits displaying human remains, plus the public perception of them. Thoughts on how the Herculaneum compares? The display of (replica) remains in the boat houses there hit me really hard.
Okay so first of all. A little bit of background for people who might not know much about the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii.
October 24th, 79 AD, the volcano Vesuvius erupts. Buries the city. While a lot of the people were either no longer in residence already (it was a tourist destination) or did evacuate when the volcanic activity started, not all of them did: A lot of the people who didn't evacuate were, we think, enslaved people -- ones intentionally left behind to guard the rich fancy manor houses just in case everything turned out fine. They all died. If they survived the first day of falling ash and rock, they perished instantly when the pyroclastic flow hit the city. A pyroclastic flow is a wave of gas and debris from a volcanic eruption. They can reach speeds of over 400mph and temperatures exceeding 1200F (700C).
Over 1500 people died instantly. They were scared and alone and helpless, and they saw their deaths coming for them and the world ending right before their eyes. It is a fucking tragedy. I don't care if it happened two thousand years ago. It is a horrible tragedy, and if you can't feel an ounce of compassion for how terrified those poor people must have been, I don't know what to tell you.
Now. The tragedy of it all is one thing, but there's a secondary factor which adds some complication, and that's simply that science and history (and the intersection of them we call "archaeology") IS really fucking cool, even when it's about a horrible tragedy. It just is. One of the amazing things about Pompeii as an archaeological site is that the eruption preserved so much -- frescoes on the houses, jewelry, furniture, food. We have actual loaves of bread that got instantly carbonized during the explosion, so perfectly that you can still see the baker's stamp on them.
The bodies also got preserved, in a way. The falling ash condensed around them and formed kind of a mold that stayed intact while the organic material decomposed and left an empty cavity behind. (Not entirely empty. Many of them still have bones, at least, and scientists have recently been able to get enough DNA to test whether bodies found grouped together were genetically related or not, what their skin and eye color was, their ethnic background...).
When excavations began in the 1800s, archaeologists found these cavities and started pouring liquid plaster into them, and now we have... the people. Exact casts of a person at the moment of their death. With some of them, you can still see their facial expressions, or the folds of their clothing. Their eyelids, their lips, the details of their nose. That's not just a plaster cast one step off from a statue-- that's a person. That's a person.
When I went to Pompeii to research for my book, I was horrified with the choices the curators of the site and the associated museum spaces had made about the treatment of these dead bodies. I saw skeletons lying in the open air on just grass, with no protection from the elements but basically a steel shed roof and a rope to keep people from going up to them. I saw these plaster casts in glass museum display boxes, as if they were no different than any of the other artifacts and objects. More than one of these display boxes were also just out in the open air with little more protection than a single roof over them.
There was no care taken whatsoever to educate the visitors and prime them to treat these casts with a degree of solemnity and compassion. I watched visitors taking photographs of the casts like they were just objects like any other thing in a glass case -- I watched one girl take a selfie with one of them while doing a peace sign and a silly face. In the airport on the way home, I met a woman who insisted to me that the plaster casts didn't have any organic material left in them whatsoever, even though I had seen with my own eyes ones which had skulls visible with the cracks where the plates had fused together when they were children. I saw one made of wax rather than plaster, with teeth visible, with finger bones visible.
So I loop around back to the tragedy of it all again. The science is very cool, and part of me is glad that photographs of them exist on the internet for educational purposes, so that people can see them without having to go there in person -- but I am so, so displeased with what you see when you go there in person. There is no honor paid to the fact that this was a human fucking tragedy.
And the fact that so many of these people were probably slaves makes it even worse -- objectified in life, objectified in death. Not treated like a person, even after 2000 years, still just a thing for people to look at and be entertained by. Doesn't it hurt your heart? Doesn't it hurt to think that you're looking at a frozen moment in time where a fellow human being died in hopeless panic, and everyone around you is mindlessly taking photographs and drifting on to the next thing without feeling any human connection whatsoever?
But it's not the fault of the visitors. It's the curators' fault -- it's the fault of how they choose to frame the bodies, how they fail to construct an environment of respect and solemnity around them which would whisper to the visitor, "Remember: You're looking at a person. Give them honor in death that they may not have ever been given in life."
The question, then, is... How would that be done? Well, the best that I've personally ever seen it done was at a museum in Dublin, Ireland. It has a bog body. I love bog bodies. I love mummies, I always have. I went to see the bog body in Dublin when I was about 24, well before I had started developing any of these thoughts and opinions on Museum Discourse and how we find a balance between educating the public versus respecting the memory of a person. And yet, even just going in raw without any of those developed opinions, I NOTICED the things that museum did differently with the bog body. I walked into the big room and it was like any other museum big room: Objects in glass cases, well-lit, with little cards by each one to tell you a few things about them.
But then in the center of the room, there was a structure that had been built, a big white wall in a circle, with an entrance at one side which (as I recall) gave you all the educational info right there -- and reminded you that by entering the space within, you would see human remains, and to please refrain from photography and be respectful. You can't see the body by just glancing inside -- you have to go along a spiral path for a couple yards before you reach the center. Spirals are sacred in Celtic mythology, as you have already learned elsewhere in the museum.
By this framework, you as the visitor are invited to make a conscious choice about seeing the body -- not because they're worried it might upset you, but because they're prompting you to wake up from your sleepy mindset of dazedly wandering around and passively Looking at stuff and approach this particular exhibit with conscious intentionality. The spiral path feels like it's supposed to in mythology: A journey inward from the external world to the inner world of the soul.
It didn't feel like a museum exhibit when I went in. The signals and prompts and framing devices were so subtle and gentle, but they were effective -- it felt like I was visiting someone in their home. It was peaceful, it was reverent, it was gentle and compassionate. I don't recall that there was any educational info on the inside of the structure, just the body in its case--as if they wanted you to leave your intellectual curiosity at the door and approach this with just your heart. With all this framing, it was impossible not to look at the bog body as an object. It was a person, and I'm a person, and for a few quiet moment we got to spend some time together.
The Pompeii curators could do that, or something like that. They could use all their research about ancient Roman funerary practices to house the bodies in a context that would honor who they were in life. They haven't fucking done it. 1500 people dead in one of the world's most famous natural disasters, and the Pompeii curators just stick them in un-labeled glass cases, without even information (at least that I saw) about where on the site they were found, or they leave skeletons out raw in the open air with nothing but a shed roof over them to keep off the rain. I saw one (1) sign that said basically "btw there's plaster casts of dead people inside here, don't look if you're sensitive :)" Talk about virtue signaling.
That's how I feel about Pompeii. It's very, very, verycool, and if you get a chance, you should 1000000% go, there is nothing like it, and there is SO MUCH to see that is absolutely marvelous. Go stand in the middle of the Coliseum. Go look at the frescoes and mosaics in the houses. Go look at the fast-food joints that are fucking everywhere.
And while you're there, you should stand with the plaster casts for a minute and just... be a person spending a few moments with another person. I'm not going to tell you to categorically NEVER take photos, because there's a thousand different arguments why you should or shouldn't, but... If you ARE going to take photos, at least do it thoughtfully and with intention, and ask yourself why you're doing it, and what you're going to actually use the photo for or DO with it, and whether it's more valuable to the growth of your human soul to 1) have a few new megabytes on your phone that you're going to forget about in a couple weeks OR 2) sit with your emotion and quietly encode the memory of this moment in your own mind and heart, so that when you revisit it, you have more than just the image on the screen: The sounds, the feeling of the wind, the sting of whatever you're feeling. A picture can't remember that for you, and that's the important part.
At this point, internet best practice says I should pivot hard into cheery marketing for my book, but I can't fucking do it on this one, man. Rummage through the rest of my tumblr if you want to know about it, fuck.
Signal boost until one of the museum interns at Pompeii sees this. (Hi Pompeii museum intern. Show this to your boss, please, and tell them to email me.)
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