Digging deeper: Archaeologists race to show Pompeii daily life

— -- Mount Vesuvius still looms, quiet for now, over Pompeii. But for the lost Roman city, the drama never really ends.

Buried in A.D. 79 by the volcano's eruption, the storied victim of antiquity continues to surprise scholars with new discoveries, even as their hopes dim for the site's survival.

"There is a lot going on, and it's always in crisis," says classicist Kenneth Lapatin of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Pompeii lay silent under about 20 feet of volcanic ash and stone until it was discovered in 1748. Since then, it has never been out of the public eye.

• Historians are continually working to separate the myths about Pompeii from the reality of how its artists, athletes, leaders and citizens lived in the years before the volcanic blew. Continuing excavation — 30% of Pompeii is still buried — has produced a steady stream of discoveries.

For example, researchers at the United Kingdom's Warwick University are now working on a digital re-creation of the statue of a wounded Amazon warrior discovered in 2006. In recent years, scholars have focused on how the ancient Greeks and Romans painted their statues with colors that seem garish compared to the cool marble creations of the Renaissance.

• A major exhibit of artifacts titled Pompeii and the Roman Villa has gone from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it will stay until Oct. 4.

There is a companion exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Getty villa that houses this exhibit is a replica of the Villa of the Papyri, a library of Greek manuscripts unearthed at Pompeii's sister city of Herculaneum, also buried by Vesuvius.

• Scientists fear that Pompeii itself will ultimately be undone by exposure to the weather and the 2.5 million tourists who visit each year. The Italian government last year declared a state of emergency to speed preservation efforts at the 109-acre ruin.

"It is enormously expensive to keep in working condition. Just removing the weeds is a great deal of work," says Cambridge University's Mary Beard, author of The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. "A ruin is always going to become ruined when you expose it."