Dr. Jessica Venner

It's crazy.

We've got about 100 plaster casts of those people.

They don't do that anymore.

Some of them were destroyed in World War II in bombing, which is unfortunate.

But

Overall, they're starting to conduct DNA analysis on these people.

For example, we had a couple who were sort of thought as mother and father with two children under some stairs.

They've since been found to be completely unrelated.

The children were unrelated.

the people were unrelated and they were both men.

This could be, for example, a case of slaves in a household hiding under the stairs.

They wouldn't have probably gone.

They might have been ordered to stay there, for example.

And so these things are very, very, very hard to look at, the plaster cast, but it's very important to remember that they are not things, but people.

and that their skeletons are inside there, but they're also giving us a huge amount of evidence because they were all killed evenly, regardless of their status.

It was a leveler, this disaster.

We can learn about them not from how they died from disease or whatever, but all at the same time.

For an archaeologist, it's a very rich source.

I know.

It's crazy.