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Herculaneum

An anthropologist can examine a skeleton and find out whether a person was male or female. If she was female, for example, they can tell you about how old she was when she died, whether she had children, what kind of work she might have done and what kind of food she ate. They can even glue dozens of small pieces of a skull back together like a jigsaw puzzle and show you what that person looked like. Workmen digging a drainage ditch near the ruins of Herculaneum had accidentally discovered some skeletons lying on what had once been the town's beachfront. Nearby, archaeologists had later uncovered some boat storage chambers in the ancient seawall. Much to their surprise, there were more skeletons inside these cave-like rooms. Here people had found shelter from the terrifying eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D.79. As they lay huddled together in the dark, they were smothered by an enormous surge of scorching gas and ash from the volcano. Flowing hot ash, rock and pumice then buried them. Today, almost two thousand years later, the tangled remains of these ancient Romans lie as they fell, preserved in the wet volcanic earth.

This was an amazing discovery. Although archaeologists have been digging out Herculaneum for centuries, very few bodies had ever been found. As a result, experts had decided that almost all of the Herculaneum must have escaped before the disaster. We now knew that this was not true.

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