Vesuvius revisited: a new story of the day the world exploded

Outside, the world was vanishing. A scum of ash was thickening on the surface of the Gulf of Naples, and black fumes were swallowing the sky above. In a waterfront warehouse in the Roman town of Oplontis, five dozen people cowered in terror. Some clutched gold coins and jewelry—family wealth snatched up in panic. Others gripped common iron tools and little more. One young woman hugged her swollen belly, terrified for the unborn child inside. Their ages and social classes varied widely, but they’d likely all gathered in a storeroom on the water’s edge for the same reason: to await a rescue boat they were increasingly fearful would never come.

What happened that day in A.D. 79 began with a single event, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. But each settlement in the volcano’s shadow—including the most famous, Pompeii—experienced a distinct catastrophe depending on its location relative to the volcano and the timing, speed, and direction of the material Vesuvius spewed. A handful of lucky folks within those communities escaped. But many suffered agonizing deaths: some when pebble-size pumice called lapilli rained down for hours, collapsing buildings onto them; others when superheated avalanches of ash, gas, and rock known as pyroclastic currents scorched everything in their path. The commercial hub of Pompeii largely escaped the pyroclastic currents but disappeared beneath more than 10 feet of wind-borne lapilli. Heaps of ash then hardened around the dead, leaving cavities that, when filled with plaster in later centuries, produced the now iconic casts of their death throes. The posh coastal retreat of Herculaneum was mostly spared the lapilli but got pummeled by pyroclastic currents that carbonized organic materials like papyrus and entombed the city beneath 60 feet of stone. Oplontis, situated between Pompeii and Herculaneum, was hit by both, preserving an elaborate frescoed villa as well as the skeletons of dozens of victims.

No one waiting for help in that storeroom made it out alive. By the time any rescue boat could have arrived, the men, women, and children huddled there would already have been buried beneath 30 feet of debris, where they remained for the better part of 2,000 years.

Since the first systematic excavations of the Vesuvius region in the 18th century, scholars have puzzled over the lives of the victims. Modern researchers, armed with tools like artificial intelligence and advanced DNA analysis, are uncovering what earlier generations could only guess at. Discoveries from these three sites are shining new light on life in the Roman Empire. In Oplontis, the skeletons in the storeroom promise rare insights into class and gender dynamics. In Pompeii, a buried latrine is spurring a first-of-its-kind genomic study about ancient diet and health. And in Herculaneum, researchers have gleaned clues about the era’s philosophy and moral codes from a cache of carbonized scrolls that have recently been rendered readable with virtual unwrapping technologies.

What’s emerging is a coherent story about a world not so distant from our own—a thriving society preoccupied with social inequities, health and wellness, and what it means to lead a fulfilling life.

The items looked like trash—nothing but scorched bundles of old cloth. But when diggers excavating a villa in Herculaneum in 1750 took a closer look, they were surprised to realize that they’d actually found papyrus scrolls. The scholars brought in to examine the scrolls—estimated to number between 650 and a thousand, some whole and some in fragments—were both thrilled and frustrated. On the one hand, they represented the only known library to survive from antiquity, a sensational find. Yet the scrolls were so delicate that they could barely be handled safely, much less unwrapped and read. A veritable time capsule from the past, only we lacked the tools to open it.

At least until recently. Thanks to new technologies, the stories and accounts recorded in these age-old scrolls are beginning to trickle out.

We normally think of natural disasters destroying objects; rarely do we consider how they preserve them. When Vesuvius erupted, hot pyroclastic currents swallowed up and sealed off Herculaneum, eventually forming 60 feet of overlying rock. Organic material there—wax tablets, wooden cradles, loaves of bread—didn’t decay so much as bake into carbonized fossils. The scrolls met the same fate. Today all but a few of them reside in Naples, locked in cabinets deep inside a national library. Most look warped and charred, others look as if somebody stepped on a burrito, then blowtorched it. Their tight black wrappings are incredibly delicate—as fragile as butterfly wings, a conservator once said.

Over the centuries, scholars tried several times to coax the scrolls open, using everything from infusions of mercury to a machine that tugged the ends with silk threads and deposited the crumbling flakes onto adhesive pig-bladder membranes. From this work, they learned that the collection consisted mostly of Greek-language works by Philodemus, a first-century B.C. Epicurean philosopher known for his musings on topics like theology and morality. Despite a few triumphs, most attempts at unrolling only destroyed the papyri without yielding much, and officials finally banned all such attempts a quarter century ago. The equivalent of thousands of pages of text—more than the collected works of Shakespeare—seemed destined to remain forever mute.

Then, in the early 2000s, a computer vision specialist at the University of Kentucky named Brent Seales developed a plan to virtually unwrap the scrolls. He would first capture 3D images of their internal layers using x-ray tomography, similar to a hospital CT scan. Software would then “segment” the scan into patches, flatten them for easier reading, and scour them for ink. Over the past several years, Seales has expedited the laborious process by training AI programs to do various tasks, including detecting and enhancing ink, which can impart a distinct texture to papyrus, like dried mud.

(Vesuvius buried these scrolls. AI is bringing them back.)

He also publicly released his team’s images of the scrolls, inviting programmers worldwide to tinker with the ink-detection algorithms. To incentivize this work, he partnered with two Silicon Valley financiers in 2023 to launch the Vesuvius Challenge, which offered cash prizes for hitting certain milestones, like reading the first letters. Seales can still recall the thrill he felt nine months later, when a trio of college and Ph.D. students successfully excavated 2,000 Greek letters across 16 partial columns of text—making those passages visible for the first time in two millennia. “The rocket was lit,” he remembers thinking.

Dozens more scrolls have since been scanned and fed into Seales’s program, though it’s not as if whole texts just magically pop out now. Due to ancient damage, papyri are often missing words or whole columns. And the AI has limits: It scrutinizes each pixel and declares it ink or not-ink but cannot recognize letters, much less interpret passages. That work falls to scholars like Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist and professor at the University of Naples Federico II who served as a judge on the Vesuvius Challenge.

The longest digitally unwrapped scroll, an astonishing 20 feet, initially presented a mystery. Given the holes in certain words, a researcher on Nicolardi’s team, Maria Chiara Robustelli, spent several minutes puzzling over each one—and when she finally did decipher them, the words seemed wildly out of place. “I was confused because I expected something different, philosophical words or something,” Robustelli says. Instead, she found terms like koureion (“barbershop”) and myropolion (“perfume shop”). Equally confounding was a phrase another scholar identified: methyskesthai (“to get drunk”). What kind of philosophy was this? Nicolardi’s team eventually traced the passage to Characters, a work on ethics written by a student of Aristotle’s in the fourth century B.C. It came from a section on bdelyros (the “repulsive man”), which criticizes busybodies who start frivolous lawsuits or boast about drinking at social haunts like barbershops and perfumeries. The overall scroll, they determined, was a previously unknown portion of a larger work by Philodemus called On Vices. It dissects character flaws and moral failings, and offers guidance on becoming a better human being. This work seems to have a practical, everyday bent—a contrast to the often esoteric academic philosophy of modern times.

Another digitally unwrapped scroll considers whether scarce goods provide more pleasure than abundant ones. Its thesis remains unclear—members of Nicolardi’s team have a 20-euro bet on what the title will be—but the text discusses sensory perceptions and again draws on examples from daily life, including music, bread, and even capers. The scroll offers glimpses of the author’s character as well: He disparages those who disagree with him as “stupid” and “fools.” This was no-holds-barred philosophy. Recently, Nicolardi determined that one scroll on theology by Philodemus was titled “On Gods, Book 8.” Books 1 and possibly 3 were known before this, but no others—meaning her team has seemingly proved, in a single stroke, the existence of several completely unknown works, any of which could expand our knowledge of the Greek pantheon of gods. The scrolls could also illuminate the inner workings of ancient libraries. The ragged shapes of certain scrolls fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, leading scholars to conclude that they were shelved side by side when pyroclastic currents from Vesuvius washed over and warped them. Knowing the contents of neighboring scrolls could in turn reveal the library’s filing system—by topic, by language, by genre, or by something else entirely.

But why did the library’s owner possess so many works by a single author, especially a middling philosopher like Philodemus? Where’s the Aristotle, the Homer, the Herodotus? Philodemus is known to have moved to Italy later in life, and Nicolardi suspects the Herculaneum library might be his archive, passed down to friends or family. Finding drafts and different versions of his treatises among the scrolls would lend weight to this idea.

Or something truly unexpected could emerge. After a morning examining the blackened scrolls, Nicolardi goes around the table, asking what each team member’s dream discovery would be. They mention letters between famous philosophers, lost Latin epics, a catalog of the Herculaneum villa’s library. Nicolardi also wants to dig for additional scrolls at Herculaneum. “Part of the villa has never been excavated,” she notes, and it happens to lie next to where most of the original scrolls were found. More could easily turn up.

In 1974, construction crews sinking pylons for a school gymnasium in the town of Torre Annunziata struck something unexpected. Instead of bedrock, they discovered an ancient Roman warehouse and its storeroom full of skeletons. This was a remarkable archaeological find: people from all walks of life, all killed in the same disaster and perhaps in the same instant. By the time of their death, Oplontis was a well-established suburb of Pompeii with one of the most elaborate villas in the entire Vesuvius region, a site now known as Oplontis A. An inscription on a clay amphora there links Oplontis A’s owners to the Poppaea, the family of Roman emperor Nero’s second wife. The home’s grandeur is still overwhelming today: marble sculptures and fountains, a 200-foot swimming pool, and “masterpiece frescoes,” says University of Texas professor John R. Clarke, who leads excavations as co-director of the Oplontis Project. The mostly intact frescoes, depicting sphinxes, centaurs, peacocks, figs, and more, have been found in many of the 103 rooms discovered here so far; the villa’s west wing is still being excavated. But there are ominous signs if you look closer. Damage to some frescoes marks where superheated gas from pyroclastic currents tore through in A.D. 79. Other walls show violent bulges, like hernias. And while the villa once sat on a 40-foot cliff overlooking the Gulf of Naples, detritus from the eruption pushed the modern shoreline out half a mile.

Around 300 yards east sits a large warehouse now known as Oplontis B. It stood two stories tall, with more than 70 rooms arranged around a central courtyard; townhouses with shops surrounded it. Some 1,600 clay amphorae turned up, many stacked upside down to dry, suggesting merchants bottled wine there. Piles of now carbonized pomegranate skins, commonly used in leather tanning, hint at other crafts. But the most prized discovery from Oplontis B lay in a dark, cavelike storeroom on the ground floor. Because the bodies of the Oplontis victims were buried by ash topped off with pyroclastic material, their bones remained intact. Whereas ancient cemeteries were often segregated by class, the freak destruction of Oplontis preserved a diverse array of people in one spot, leaving behind one of the most scientifically valuable assemblages of Roman dead.

Today Oplontis B’s courtyard looks bucolic, with stately columns and mossy stones. A block of amphorae sits to one side, fused together in volcanic deposits. However, the upper story is too unstable to visit, and has been taken over by noisy pigeons. For years the place was easy to overlook, but Valeria Amoretti, a bioarchaeologist who heads the Applied Research Laboratory at Pompeii, sees something rich in these ruins. “We are so focused on Pompeii,” she says. “Sometimes we forget to take a look at the suburbs.”

Despite good intentions, excavators in the 1980s failed to document the storeroom skeletons in the detail scientists would today. They didn’t always distinguish carefully between bodies lying atop each other, and bones from individuals became mixed up. The situation left behind—scores of specimen bins full of skeletal parts in plastic bags—has become a literal puzzle to sort out.

The remains now reside in Amoretti’s lab, where her team is reassembling the skeletons piece by piece, work that could deepen our understanding of gender, class, and the prevalence of violence in the ancient world. On a recent visit, one of Amoretti’s graduate student researchers, Valentina Giacometti, pulled out several bags. One held half a jawbone, another the shattered fragments of a spine. Giacometti has spent years laying the pieces out on tables, fitting them back together. While earlier excavators counted 54 victims, Amoretti’s crew has identified at least 60—including toddlers and unborn children. They were found in two distinct clusters: Roughly 20 victims were positioned deep within the barrel-vaulted room, clutching tools and lanterns. The rest were near the door, perhaps first in line for a rescue boat, and laden with coins and jewelry, including gold necklaces, a silver snake bracelet, and an emerald- and pearl-encrusted pendant. To some, this disparity suggests two social groups: laborers and enslaved people in the back, merchants or elites at the front. Even in the face of death, it seems, the hierarchies of Roman life held firm.

This class division remains a theory, although work emerging from Amoretti’s lab could put that supposition on secure footing. Once Giacometti has sorted out which bones belong to which individuals, the team can compile what scholars call osteobiographies—personal histories of people as inscribed on their bones. As one example, Giacometti tilts a teenage boy’s skull, pointing out faint ripples on his front teeth, a possible sign of childhood malnutrition. Scars on weight-bearing bones can reveal a life of physical toil. On other victims, Giacometti has noted repeated fractures and blunt-force trauma—maybe a tally of violence. With the data in hand, other researchers can also explore social and gender dynamics. If female skeletons bear marks of manual labor, that would broaden understandings of the work they performed in Roman society. If any of the jewelry-laden bodies show signs of malnourishment in childhood, that could point to an enslaved person who later rose in status—evidence of class mobility that modern minds rarely associate with enslavement.

Over the past few decades, archaeology has broadened its horizons to document the lives of vulnerable and overlooked populations. The Oplontis skeletons afford a rare opportunity to compare the bones of men and women from different social strata—a bustling blend of merchants, laborers, enslaved people, and wealthy elites, united in violent death.

No one knows who lived at the stately mansion in southern Pompeii now known as Casa della Regina Carolina, after the queen of Naples who sponsored initial excavations there in the early 1800s. The home was distinguished above all by its approximately 8,000-square-foot garden, a meticulously landscaped oasis near two busy theaters, with trees, vines, flowering plants, and private shrines for prayer and reflection.

The home’s second story was destroyed during the Vesuvius eruption, and almost all decoration on the first floor’s walls has crumbled away. But the replanted garden remains a shady refuge amid the daily throngs of tourists, who hurry by without realizing the real treasure here lies below the surface.

Genetic archaeologists generally extract DNA from bones or other biological material, and have done so before at Pompeii. But a team co-led by Caitie Barrett, an archaeologist at Cornell University and a National Geographic Explorer, recently succeeded in taking DNA from soil samples of Casa della Regina Carolina’s garden—discovering evidence for olives and grapes. Future work, there and elsewhere, could identify rare varieties or lost cultivars, hinting at households with a taste for the exotic. More important, this work proved something fundamental: that fragile DNA has very likely survived within the ancient soil at Pompeii.

Building on this study, Barrett and her colleagues now hope to piece together details about the home’s inhabitants—what they ate and drank, and potentially how they fell ill and cared for their sick. In fact, they’re already extracting genetic material from a spot less glamorous than the garden: the home’s latrine complex. Above ground, near the kitchen, two toilets occupied separate but adjacent rooms, like a modern restroom’s individual stalls. But below ground, pits collecting human waste were connected.

Last summer, the team partially excavated one of those pits, about a yard wide. (Asked whether her crew smelled anything funny as they dug, Barrett laughed and recalled “a urine smell—very faint, very subtle.”) Their samples are being analyzed by Flavio De Angelis and Eduardo Amorim, geneticists at Arizona State University who are searching for DNA from multiple organisms, including intestinal worms, to explore disease burdens in Pompeii. But their main focus is the gut microbiome: the diverse community of bacteria populating the human digestive tract that gets shed in stool. Two people’s guts can carry significantly different bacterial mixes depending on diet. Certain species thrive on milk, others on sugars, fats, or proteins. By measuring the relative abundance of each bacterium’s DNA in the latrine, the team hopes to reconstruct what the household ate and how varied their table was.

The latrines may also yield human DNA, which could reveal details about the home’s inhabitants. Once a single grand home, the property had been divided into a larger unit and a smaller one by the time Vesuvius erupted. Each had its own latrine, and Barrett suggests that comparing DNA from both might reveal the relationship between the households. Finding similar DNA could suggest that the smaller one was an in-law suite. Mismatched DNA might indicate a rental property. Or the presence of many unrelated individuals could suggest something else. Perhaps the owner was an influential person receiving petitioners at home. “We’re interested in telling the story of everybody else who would have been part of this house,” Barrett says.

De Angelis and Amorim also hope their genetic analysis can provide insight into psychological ailments in the Roman era. The human gastrointestinal tract contains roughly 100 million neurons between the esophagus and rectum. Anything that affects them—including gut bacteria—could, in principle, affect brain function. “There is a direct connection between the gut microbiome and mental health,” says De Angelis.

Studies among populations today have already identified associations between specific bacteria and conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and also with diseases like Alzheimer’s. The team’s samples could reveal the presence of these ailments in the ancient world.

Although they lack the dazzle of Pompeii’s most famous artifacts—breathtaking frescoes, sculptures, candelabras—DNA data from Casa della Regina Carolina are just as revealing. While a latrine might seem “gross and unbeautiful,” Barrett says, “in many ways, we can learn more from things like toilets and trash heaps than we can from beautiful statuary.”

Indeed, the discoveries emerging from Herculaneum, Oplontis, and Pompeii have deepened our understanding of everyone who lived there. The philosophy of the era, as reflected in the Herculaneum scrolls, includes instructions on practical, everyday matters. The bones of laborers and enslaved people speak to the invisible, often backbreaking work that kept the Roman Empire running. The wisps of DNA from latrines could reveal the sicknesses that darkened their days. These people were like us in so many ways, and if Vesuvius had stayed quiet, Pompeii and its sister cities might have thrived for years. Instead, the volcano destroyed them—and thereby preserved them for all of history. Even after 2,000 years, the most famous disaster in history continues to surprise us.