Reading the casts as if they were photographs taken in ordinary life — as if the gold bracelet adult’s posture tells us about their normal relationship to the child, as if the embracing pair’s final physical closeness tells us about the nature of their bond — treats preserved emergency postures as if they were representative of the full range of behavior that characterized these individuals’ lives. They are not. They are evidence of one specific moment, and interpreting them requires constant attention to what that moment was.
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## The Continuing Excavation
Pompeii has been under excavation for more than two hundred and fifty years, and it is not yet fully excavated. Estimates suggest that approximately a third of the site’s area remains to be excavated, beneath the protective cover of volcanic deposit that has been left in place partly for conservation reasons and partly because excavation technology and methodological standards continue to improve, and future excavators will likely be able to extract more information from the unexcavated areas than current methods would permit.
The areas that remain unexcavated include portions of residential neighborhoods, a section of the forum area, and parts of the city’s periphery. New discoveries in the excavated areas continue as restoration and conservation work exposes previously unnoticed features. Recent years have seen significant announcements from Pompeii, including the discovery of a fast-food counter (thermopolium) with remarkably preserved frescoes and food remains, elaborately decorated rooms in a large villa, and the remains of horses still harnessed in their stable.
New victims are occasionally discovered as well. The ongoing work of the Archaeological Park, particularly in connection with the Great Pompeii Project initiated in 2012, has produced skeletal remains and in some cases body voids that may eventually yield additional casts or DNA samples. Each new find is now approached with the full range of modern analytical tools rather than with the visual interpretation methods of earlier eras.