Herculaneum

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Herculaneum sits beneath the modern Italian town of Ercolano, a city of Roman streets and painted walls frozen in place since the 1st century AD. On a summer afternoon in 79 AD, the volcano rising above the Bay of Naples began to change everything. The question at the centre of Herculaneum's story is not simply how it was destroyed, but what that destruction preserved, and who waited on the beach when the sky came down.

  Herculaneum was smaller than its famous neighbour Pompeii, with a population of around 5,000. Yet it was wealthier. Rome's elite kept retreat houses here, and the town's buildings reflect that wealth in their lavish use of coloured marble. When Vesuvius erupted, the wind carried most of the ash away from Herculaneum toward the southeast, toward Pompeii. For a few hours, Herculaneum's residents had an advantage their neighbours did not.

  Most fled. A few did not. What happened to those who stayed, and what the volcanic material did to the town itself, would make Herculaneum one of the most revealing archaeological sites in the world, and one of the least understood. Over 75% of the city remains underground today, and the ground above it is occupied by a modern city that cannot simply be moved.

• 2. Before the Ash

  ›

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus credits the founding of Herculaneum to the Greek hero Heracles, but Strabo places the original settlement with the Oscans. Both accounts point to a town that changed hands repeatedly long before Rome arrived. The Etruscans controlled it at one point, then the Greeks, who named it Heraklion and used its position near the Gulf of Naples as a trading base.

  In the 4th century BC, the Samnites absorbed the town into their sphere. By the 2nd century BC, Herculaneum had city walls built between two and three metres thick, constructed mainly of large pebbles. The coastal section used a different technique, opus reticulatum, a diamond-patterned stonework that Roman builders favoured. When Herculaneum joined the Social War of 91-88 BC on the side of Rome's Italian allies against Rome itself, the city paid a price. Titus Didius, a legate of Sulla, defeated it.

  After that defeat, Herculaneum became a Roman municipium in 89 BC. The thick walls that had defined the city's boundaries gradually lost their military purpose. Over time they were absorbed into private houses and public structures, including a building known as the House of the Inn. The coastal setting and proximity to Naples made the town a natural draw for wealthy Romans seeking a retreat from city life, and that reputation would shape the character of its buildings right up to the moment Vesuvius ended them.

• 3. The Day Vesuvius Moved

  ›

  Pliny the Younger wrote two letters to the Roman historian Tacitus describing what he witnessed, and those letters, combined with archaeology, allow a reconstruction of events hour by hour. At around 1 pm on the first day, Vesuvius began sending volcanic material thousands of metres into the sky. The column at its top flattened, and Pliny described the shape to Tacitus as a stone pine tree.

  The prevailing winds that day blew toward the southeast. Pompeii was buried under falling debris while only a few centimetres of ash settled on Herculaneum to the west. Roofs in Pompeii collapsed under the weight. Herculaneum's structures held. Still, the ash was enough to prompt most of the town's people to leave.

  At 1 am the following day, the eruptive column collapsed. The first pyroclastic surge, a fast-moving mixture of ash and hot gases, swept down the mountain and through Herculaneum at 160 km/h. Five more flows and surges followed, burying the city's buildings under approximately 20 metres of material. In some areas the structures were left almost intact. In others, walls came down, columns were torn away, and a marble statue of Marcus Nonius Balbus near the baths was pushed 15 metres from where it had stood. A carbonised skeleton was found suspended 2.5 metres above ground level in the garden of the House of the Relief of Telephus.

  The date of the eruption had long been assumed to be in August, but evidence from the site itself points to October or later. People buried in the ash wore heavier clothes suited to cooler weather. Shops contained fresh fruit and vegetables typical of October, while summer fruit had already been preserved or dried. Wine fermentation jars had been sealed, which would have happened around the end of October. A coin found in the purse of a woman killed in the ash bore a 15th imperatorial acclamation that could not have been minted before the second week of September.

• 4. Who Died on the Beach

  ›

  Before the 1980s, archaeologists assumed most of Herculaneum's residents had escaped. Only a handful of skeletons had been found during earlier excavations, and the prevailing view held that the town was largely evacuated. Between 1980 and 1982, excavations near the ancient shoreline overturned that assumption. More than 55 skeletons appeared on the beach and in the first six stone vaults facing the sea, the structures that later became known as the boat houses.

  Further work in the 1990s brought the total to 296 skeletons found on the beach or sheltering in nine of the twelve stone vaults. Eventually, 340 bodies were identified in this area. Among them, discovered in 1982, was a woman known as the Ring Lady, named for the rings on her fingers. Analysis of the skeletal postures suggested the people in the vaults did not suffocate slowly. A scientific study concluded they died almost instantly, killed by fulminant shock from a temperature of around 500 degrees Celsius. Extreme heat caused hands and feet to contract and fractured bones and teeth.

  The patterns of who sheltered where offered their own picture of the final hours. Men were more likely to be found on the open beach; women and children were concentrated in the boat houses. One skeleton, number 26, discovered in 1982 next to a boat, belonged to a man carrying an elaborate dagger and belt. Researchers have suggested he may have been a military officer involved in a rescue attempt from the sea.

  A study published in 2021 used stable isotope analysis of bone samples from 17 individuals to examine diet. Men had eaten roughly 1.6 times more fish than the women in the group. Women's diets showed more meat, eggs, and dairy. The analysis placed Herculaneum's inhabitants within the broader dietary patterns of Roman Italy.

• 5. Tunnels and Treasure Seekers

  ›

  Prince d'Elbeuf began building a villa in the neighbouring area of Granatello in the early 18th century. Hearing local stories about wells that contained ancient sculptures, he purchased the site of a recently dug well in 1709 and had workers tunnel outward from its base in search of objects. They broke into what was later identified as a theatre, and among the earliest pieces recovered were two finely carved female figures now held in the Skulpturensammlung in Dresden. The tunnel was abandoned in 1711 when concern grew about the stability of structures above.

  Regular excavations began in 1738 under the patronage of Charles III of Spain, who was then building his palace in nearby Portici. He assigned the project to the Italian military engineer Giovanni Antonio Medrano and to Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre. The publication that followed, titled Le Antichità di Ercolano, carried images and descriptions of the finds to European audiences and left a measurable mark on the aesthetic movement known as Neoclassicism. By the end of the 18th century, motifs drawn from Herculaneum appeared on wall paintings, tripod tables, perfume burners, and teacups in fashionable homes across Europe.

  The art historian Winckelmann sharply criticised the treasure-hunting methods being used at the site, and excavation stopped again in 1762. Pompeii, which lay under only about 4 metres of material compared to Herculaneum's 20, proved far easier to work and drew most of the attention and resources. King Francis I revived interest in Herculaneum between 1828 and 1837, ordering land purchases and new digging. Excavations moved eastward through the newly unified Kingdom of Italy until 1875. From 1927 to 1942, the archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri ran a new campaign, funded by Mussolini's regime, that uncovered approximately four hectares now forming part of the archaeological park.

• 6. The Villa of the Papyri

  ›

  Built on the seashore across four terraces, the Villa of the Papyri is thought to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a consul and Julius Caesar's father-in-law. Piso was a patron of poets and philosophers, and the library he assembled at the villa is the only ancient library to have survived, in any form, virtually intact.

  Between 1752 and 1754, workers extracting material from the site recovered a number of blackened scrolls. The papyrus was carbonised, the text invisible. Most of the scrolls are now held at the National Library in Naples. Attempts to unroll them have met with varying success. Techniques using computer-enhanced multi-spectral infrared imaging helped make some ink legible, and later CT scans revealed the internal fibre structure of the rolls along with sand and debris trapped inside.

  In summer 2009, two scrolls held at the French National Academy in Paris were examined extensively using X-rays. The effort failed; Roman writers likely used carbon-based inks that are essentially transparent to X-ray scanning, and later attempts using the same method also came to nothing. In 2015, scientists applied X-ray Phase Contrast Tomography to increase contrast between the carbon ink and the papyrus itself, and managed to read Greek words along an outer layer. Researchers described it as a turning point for the field of papyrology, though the full contents of the scrolls remained unread.

  In 2024, participants in a competition called the Vesuvius Challenge, working with AI assistance, revealed hundreds of words across fifteen columns of text, representing around 5% of one scroll. The unexcavated section of the villa may hold more rolls, and researchers have noted that imaging techniques capable of reading a scroll without unrolling it could make those future finds accessible without the risk of damage.

• 7. What Survives, What Decays

  ›

  Herculaneum's volcanic burial was different in character from Pompeii's. The primarily pyroclastic material that covered it carbonised organic matter rather than encasing it in dry ash. That process preserved wooden roofs, beds, and doors, as well as food and papyrus. Where Pompeii's victims left hollow body-shaped voids in ash that archaeologists filled with plaster to produce recognisable casts, the extreme heat at Herculaneum vaporised flesh almost instantly. Casts of the skeletons found in chamber 10 were made by other means, and one is now on display at the Museum of Anthropology in Naples.

  Once excavations began, the very exposure that allowed study also started the process of decay. Earlier excavation methods focused on recovering valuable objects and showed little interest in preserving the site itself. Water damage from the modern city of Ercolano above weakened building foundations. Reconstruction efforts often caused more harm than good. Preservation of skeletal remains only became a formal priority in the early 1980s, under the archaeologist Sara C. Bisel.

  In 2001, the Packard Humanities Institute launched the Herculaneum Conservation Project as a private-public partnership. It began by providing financial support to local authorities, then expanded to include expert training and long-term planning. One of its early projects addressed a section of painted wall first treated by Maiuri's team in 1938. Water had seeped into the wall over the decades, causing paint to grip the old wax coating and peel away from the plaster beneath. Working alongside the Getty Museum, conservators developed a technique using solvents to remove some of the wax and reduce its accumulation, stopping the paint from continuing to detach. The Conservation Project has also partnered with the British School at Rome to train new conservators for ongoing maintenance of the site.