Giuseppe Fiorelli

Giuseppe Fiorelli (8 June 1823 – 28 January 1896) was an Italian archaeologist. His excavations at Pompeii helped preserve the city.

Fiorelli was born on 8 June 1823 in Naples. His initial work at Pompeii was completed in 1848. He was then imprisoned for some time because his radical approach to archaeology and strong nationalist feelings landed him in trouble with the king of Naples, Ferdinand II. During his time as a political prisoner, he produced a three volume work entitled History of Pompeian Antiques (1860–64). Years later, as a professor of archaeology at Naples University and director of excavations (1860–75), he established the meticulous method of studying archaeological sites layer by layer. He founded a training school where foreigners as well as Italians could learn archaeological technique and made a particular study of the materials and building methods used in Pompeii. Fiorelli also hit upon the innovation of pumping plaster into the cavities left by the victims' bodies in the hardened lava, thereby producing casts of the corpses' clothing and features. Fiorelli was also director of the Naples National Archaeological Museum from 1863 and director general of Italian Antiquities and Fine Arts from 1875 until his death in 1896. Giuseppe Fiorelli directed the Pompeii excavation from 1863 to 1875 — introducing an entirely new system for the project. Instead of uncovering the streets first, in order to excavate the houses from the ground floor up, he imposed a system of uncovering the houses from the top down — a better way of preserving everything that was discovered.

In this way the data collected during the excavations could be used to help with the restoration of the ancient buildings and of their interiors — although the most important wall paintings and mosaics still continued to be stripped and transported to Naples.

'Fiorelli ... developed the use of plaster casts to recreate the forms of plants and human bodies.' Fiorelli is most famous for his plaster casts, produced by a process 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.

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