The skeletons left covered for almost 2000 years and the plaster casts made in the 1860s from the forms left by bodies inside solidified ash are closely guarded today by the superintendents of the famous site of the spectacular volcanic eruption that wiped out an entire town.

And yet, when they were first excavated in the second half of the 18^th century, those in charge – archaeology as a discipline didn’t yet exist – held on to many of the skeletons and used them as props.

In the theatrical sense, that is, either to help tell stories about how the victims had lived, or as thrilling finds artfully placed in sites to be “found” by visiting dignitaries keen to take part in uncovering the past.

For Australian archaeologist Estelle Lazer, the bones need no theatrics or drama to tell their own stories, although the process of mythmaking surrounding the lives and deaths of the unfortunate victims is almost as fascinating as the remains themselves.

The Sydney University academic has studied the human remains at length, both on the Italian site and on one of the body casts that was brought to Australia in 1994 for an exhibition. The body was X-rayed in a Sydney clinic and Lazer worked with a team of specialists to analyse the findings.

Incredibly, it was the first examination of a Pompeii using modern technology.

“It’s astonishing that so little work was done on the material before the end of the 20^thcentury,” she says.

It’s fortunate, though, that the skeletons weren’t discarded, as was often the practice for early excavations around the Mediterranean.

“Not everyone could visit the sites, you had to be fairly important to get there, and they made a bit of a thing of it,” she says.

“There had been this sort of tradition of a culture of bodies associated with Pompeii, so various skeletons were found over the years, and they were used as … kind of props to tell stories about their lives – the deaths they had, but the lives that they never actually had.”

For example, a story grew around a particular skeleton found in the so-called Gladiators’ Barracks, draped in jewellery.

“They thought it must be a woman, a wealthy one, and what’s she doing in the gladiators’ barracks? Obviously up to no good and caught out by Mount Vesuvious, stuff like that,” Lazer says.

“There are all these myths that have sort of stayed with us right into the 21^st century. The way the site’s been dealt with and interpreted has always involved this storytelling, and not helped at all, or maybe further improved, by the novels by people like Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote The Last Days of Pompeii.

“He peopled it partially with skeletons that had been found or had allegedly been found with these stories that had built up around them, and incorporated those into his novel.”

These stories, while complicated and thrilling, have been difficult to get away from in the years since.

Lazer will be speaking about her work in Pompeii at the Australian National University on Tuesday night.

“This is the joy of doing this kind of research. We work on probabilities; you’re never 100 per cent sure of anything, and the wonderful thing about archaeology is every new find can bring up something that completely changes the way you look at the past,” she says.

“You need to be very flexible, keep an open mind and that’s part of the adventure, I really enjoy that, and certainly people have said a lot about the victims without actually looking at them very carefully.”

Her work, while relying less on melodrama, is thrilling nonetheless, not least because it’s based on science rather than legend. For example, conventional wisdom had long held that those who were buried under the ash of Mount Vesuvius were either very old, very young, sick or female – in other words, those who couldn’t outrun the disaster.

“I could actually test that by looking at the skeletal evidence, and say well, we actually get quite a wide range of individuals, not just the very young,” she says.

“The very young aren’t actually well represented, probably because of the way they were stored, because they weren’t seen as very important. They were stored very badly, so tiny baby skeletons aren’t so likely to survive in the conditions they were held in.”

She also found that, contrary to the assumption that there were more women than men in the sample, there were in fact more men, and that many had interesting disorders and conditions.

“If there are things that present on the bones, you can certainly read them,” she says.

“Bone’s wonderful, it’s plastic, you don’t realise it when you see dead bone, because it doesn’t look like it would be able to change very much, but it actually responds to stresses and insult like trauma or disease, so it will remodel throughout life, and you can actually read a person’s history on their bones.”

And what became of the “rich woman” covered in jewels in the Gladiators’ Barracks?

“Tragically that one was dug up in the latter part of the 18^th century and we don’t have it anymore. It’s really sad, we’ll never know,” she says.

Although she has worked on a variety of archaeological sites throughout her career, including Mawson’s huts in Antarctica, she admits it was probably reading about Pompeii as a young girl that drew her to her field.

“It probably inspired me quite a bit to do archaeology, so I think I’ve been extremely lucky to actually end up working there. It is a fantastic site, it’s so rich and the material’s incredible, and everything about the site’s amazing.”

Dr Estelle Lazer will be speaking at the Australian National University on Tuesday August 6, 8.00pm at Copland Lecture Theatre.