You’re a Roman villager in Herculaneum, just off the coast of the heart of the Roman
empire.
Life is good in your seaside town, which is a popular retreat for Rome’s wealthiest
citizens.
The village is full of luxurious marble houses, and everyone enjoys the view of mighty Mount
Vesuvius.
This massive volcano, over four thousand feet tall, is one of the biggest landmarks in Rome
and is a great backdrop to a relaxing day on the Herculaneum shore, especially when
it’s shaking violently
Wait, shaking?
It’s not supposed to do that!
The year was 79 AD.
Emperor Titus had just ascended the throne, following a chaotic string of successions
where four emperors had taken the throne in the same year after the death of Emperor Nero.
Rome was looking forward to a rare period of stability and Titus was looking forward
to settling into its role, but Mount Vesuvius had other plans.
The active volcano had erupted countless times since it was formed twenty-five thousand years
before, but it had been quiet for over two hundred years.
Generations had grown up without the volcano making any noise, and had come to see it as
a normal part of the environment.
But on August 24th, the mountain would prove how very wrong they were.
Herculaneum sat right next to the larger city of Pompeii, and the two ancient cities held
a population of over twenty thousand.
While Herculaneum was a luxury retreat, Pompeii was a city of workers and artisans.
But they were both right in the path of Vesuvius that morning.
While Vesuvius had been quiet, the ground had not.
In 62 AD, a major earthquake shook the region, damaging the Bay of Naples and destroying
many buildings in Pompeii.
Smaller earthquakes and aftershocks followed for the next few years, and in the four days
before the eruption, shocks were almost constant.
But everyone went about their day with the ground shaking under them regularly.
The day of the eruption started calm, according to Pliny the Younger, who was staying eighteen
miles away from the explosion.
He watched as the skies turned from calm to an inferno around one PM.
The volcano violently exploded, sending a column of ash and volcanic rock into the air.
It created a blanket of the pitch-black ash which covered the area, plunging the cities
of Herculaneum and Pompeii into darkness as people desperately tried to escape.
Then came the lava, sending long flows of red-hot molten rock into the areas below and
wiping out all structures in their path.
If anyone was still alive in the cities, they fell prey to the inferno.
Pompeii, slightly further away, was wiped out by the suffocating blanket of ash, but
what happened to Herculaneum - right next door?
Directly in the path of the gas, ash, and lava, Herculaneum was covered in seconds.
There was no escape, as people only had seconds to look at the horror bearing down on them
from the volcano before it claimed their lives.
The death came so fast that the entire town was preserved exactly as it was, coated in
a blanket of ash that left behind the buildings and the skeletons of the hundreds of inhabitants.
How did the people of Herculaneum die?
So fast that when the lava hit, the intense heat boiled the fluids in their body.
Their skin and organs vaporized, their blood evaporated, and the pressure of the lava flow
was so intense that their brains and blood vessels in their head expanded so quickly
that it cracked their skulls.
As the temperatures rose to up to 480 degrees fahrenheit at the moment of death, the heads
of every resident of Herculaneum exploded within seconds.
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius raged for almost two days, but by the end of the second day,
the seascape was calm again.
The tsunami that had been raging for a day, stirred up by the massive volcanic energy,
had passed, and all that was left was the horror Mount Vesuvius had left in its wake.
It soon became clear that the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were a total loss, with the
entire populations wiped out.
Emperor Titus moved quickly, appointing two former consuls to organize the relief effort
and resettle any refugees.
He donated a large sum of money from the imperial treasury to aid the recovery, and even went
to visit the destroyed city of Pompeii twice.
But during the second visit, a massive fire broke out in Rome in his absence and created
another crisis for Titus to deal with.
Because one disaster wasn’t enough for the new emperor, the destroyed cities went on
the back burner.
The ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii were mostly left untouched once the few survivors
were evacuated in the early days, and a few major names were among the casualties.
Pliny the Elder, uncle of the eyewitness to the explosion, joined a rescue mission to
Pompeii but was overcome by poisonous fumes and never made it back on the boat.
The Princess Drusilla, the daughter of the last king of the Herodian dynasty, fell prey
to the eruption along with her son.
Caesius Bassus, one of the best lyric poets in Rome, was also last seen in the vicinity
of the explosion and was never seen again.
Along with thousands of anonymous citizens of the coastal cities, they were never seen
again, but Mount Vesuvius was far from done.
Since the big eruption of 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius has erupted more than three dozen times.
First in 203 AD, followed by a massive eruption in 472 AD that sent ashes as far away as Constantinople
in Turkey.
In 512, the eruptions caused so much disruption that the local residents were given a pass
on taxes by the Gothic king of Italy, Theodoric the Great.
Vesuvius seemed to send ash flying into the atmosphere every few decades, but it wasn’t
until 1036 that the mountain sent lava flowing down its sides for the first time since the
destruction of Herculaneum.
By the 14th century, things were calm again, and the mountain became covered with greens
and was occupied by villagers.
Then things took a sudden and harsh turn in 1631, when another massive eruption happened,
wiping out many villages and killing over three thousand people in lava flows.
Huge mudflows were created, rendering many areas around the volcano uninhabitable.
Mount Vesuvius was suddenly more active than ever, with eruptions happening constantly
for over three hundred years.
The volcano even disrupted the 1908 Olympics, damaging the city of Naples in 1906 and sending
the Olympic committee scrambling to find an alternative site.
They were eventually held in London, with money being diverted to aid in Naples’ reconstruction.
Italy was once again at the mercy of its most notorious volcano through World War 2, when
the last major eruption happened in 1944.
Not only did several villages get destroyed, but the United States Air Force had a bombardment
group stationed there.
The hot ash emitted from the volcano was powerful enough to destroy the plexiglass windows and
gun turrets of the planes.
While thieves had looted the cities in the immediate aftermath, Herculaneum mostly stayed
buried for over a thousand years after the explosion.
New construction happened on top of the buried ruins, and it wasn’t until 1709 that the
city was rediscovered.
The locals were digging a deep well, but it wasn’t water they found at the bottom.
It was some fully preserved statues from the ruins of the old city.
The land was quickly purchased by the local Prince, who set his men to work tunneling
out the area and recovering any artifacts they could.
These statues, known as the Herculean Women, now sit in Dresden’s most prominent art
museum.
Spanish engineer Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre picked up the excavation in 1738, and discovered
many fully preserved homes that featured stunning furnishings that wouldn’t be out of place
today, including decorative murals and modern-looking teacups and tables.
But the discovery of Pompeii nearby, much easier to access, sent all the archaeologists
running to Herculaneum’s neighbor.
Into that void came Amedeo Maiuri, a famous Italian archaeologist responsible for much
of the excavation of Pompeii.
He turned his attention to Herculaneum in 1927, using modern archaeological techniques
to excavate the city.
Ultimately, he exposed four hectares of the preserved city, giving modern audiences their
first full look at what the doomed city was like.
Grouped in blocks, Herculaneum contained buildings including four major houses complete with
atriums and balconies, a temple for priests of the Imperial cult, a collection of bath
houses, and a massive villa that was once the retreat of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.
During excavation of the villa, several blackened scrolls were discovered, and scientists are
using x-ray equipment to try to read the ink printed on them thousands of years later.
No discovery in the ruins of Herculaneum has gotten more attention than the bodies found,
perfectly preserved at the moment of death.
These intact skeletons in Herculaneum and Pompeii are often posed in the exact spot
they were when the lava and ash hit.
The ruins of Herculaneum were explored in 1980 by Dr. Giuseppe Maggi, the site administrator,
and they discovered fifty-five skeletons.
Three hundred more were discovered in the 1990s.
The skeletons were preserved well enough that scientists were able to identify the gender
of each skeleton and even details such as how many children a woman had had by the shape
of her pelvis.
One skeleton, known as the Ring Lady, was found with the ornamental rings she wore in
life still on her fingers.
The skeletons were similar to the ones at Pompeii, with one major exception - the victims
at Herculaneum, who had been at the hottest point on Earth at that moment, all had cracks
or missing parts of their skulls.
In 1997, the entire site of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the nearby city of Torre Annunziata was
declared a UNESCO world heritage site.
The focus of the efforts shifted to preserving the ancient city, rather than continuing to
excavate it, due to ongoing concerns about the structural stability of the city.
If an archeological dig shifts the wrong thing, the ancient burial ground could be buried
under a tide of debris, ruining thousands of years of preservation.
Archaeologists are trying to preserve what’s been exposed for generations to come, but
dangers remain from natural disasters like another earthquake or eruption, rising sea
levels, and the growth of cities nearby.
While the thick blanket of ash protected the ruins for over 1600 years, once the cities
were excavated, the elements began wearing it down.
Many carbonized remains, when exposed to modern air, disintegrated in only days.
Intact artifacts can be seen in the Naples National Archaeological Museum, where the
curators know how to preserve the ancient and fragile discoveries.
While Herculaneum was at risk of falling into disrepair after its discovery, UNESCO has
protected the ruins and the site is off the endangered list - for now.
But one big, volcano-shaped question remains about the ruins and the surrounding city.
Could Mount Vesuvius erupt again?
The volcano is still classified as active, but it hasn’t erupted in over seventy-five
years.
There is a massive store of magma deep in the volcano, and it’s closely monitored
by the Osservatorio Vesuvio in Naples.
Any seismic activity near the volcano will instantly trigger alerts, and everyone around
it knows to be on watch.
But that hasn’t stopped life in the area.
Vesuvius was declared a national park in 1995, and people regularly hike around one of the
most dangerous volcanoes in the world.
The towns and cities around the mountain are densely populated, and a full evacuation would
be difficult in a serious eruption - and impossible in the event of another massive one like in
79 AD.
But Mount Vesuvius remains calm - for now.
Would you go on a vacation near an active volcano?
For more about the Mount Vesuvius eruption, watch “How this Volcanic Eruption Turned
People into Stone - Pompeii”.
And for a massive volcano in a totally different location, check out “This Super-Volcano
Has Scientists Freaking Out”.
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See you next time!