I just watched an interesting YouTube video, made by Metatron. He was very detailed, starting with who settled the area and why. He touches briefly on the politics and conflicts leading to the Roman city, and empasises that the “bodies” on view are not bodies at all, but plaster casts made from the cavities left in the hardened ash after the human remains decayed away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J404p7GY0g
The plaster casts contain the skeletons, teeth are visible on some of them. I suspect that the next big thing in Pompeii studies will be careful extraction of DNA samples of all the known bodies. :^)
Video link saved... thanks.