  The first curator of all the objects excavated in Herculaneum, the Roman painter Camillo Paderni, had used the method of cutting lengthwise through the rolls of papyrus and peeling off their exterior portions (referred to as the ‘bark’ or scorza), sometimes pulverizing the rolls’ central, interior portions (now referred to as ’scorzatura totale’), sometimes leaving these untouched (’scorzatura parziale’). The exterior and interior portions of a bookroll were handled differently. The exterior portions took the form of a concave shell, representing all or part of the roll’s original height, comprising numerous papyrus layers with writing visible on the topmost of these (that nearest the middle of the roll and thus the end of the text). When this stretch of text had been copied, the layer of papyrus on which it was written could be scraped off—and thereby destroyed—to reveal the next layer underneath (which would thus be nearer to the beginning, not the end, of the text).