Long before Aeneas returned from his travels, more than a thousand years before Greeks settled in Cumae and ruled the Campanian plain, prehistoric settlers came down out of the nearby Apennines and began to tame the land, growing cereal crops and tending flocks.
Later the Greeks moved east from Cumae to Neapolis, the New City, a little farther along the coast where modern Naples now stands.
We have a very good idea what life in this sun-splashed land was like during the Roman era because of the recovered splendor of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But as the well-trod earth of Campania continues to yield ancient secrets, Mastrolorenzo and Petrone, with their colleague Lucia Pappalardo, have put together a rich view of an earlier time and what may have been humankind's first encounter with the primal force of Vesuvius. Almost all has come to light by chance. In May , for example, construction workers began digging the foundation for a supermarket next to a desolate, weed-strewn intersection just outside the town of Nola.
An archaeologist working for the province of Naples noticed several traces of burned wood a few feet below the surface, an indication of earlier human habitation.
At 19 feet 6 meters below, relicts of a perfectly preserved Early Bronze Age village began to emerge. Over the next several months, the excavation unearthed three large prehistoric dwellings: horseshoe-shaped huts with clearly demarked entrances, living areas, and the equivalent of kitchens. Researchers found dozens of pots, pottery plates, and crude hourglass-shaped canisters that still contained fossilized traces of almonds, flour, grain, acorns, olive pits, even mushrooms.
Simple partitions separated the rooms; one hut had what appeared to be a loft. The tracks of goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs, as well as their human masters, crisscrossed the yard outside. The skeletons of nine pregnant goats lay in an enclosed area that included an animal pen. If a skeleton can be said to cower, the bones of an apparently terrified dog huddled under the eaves of one roof. What preserved this prehistoric village, what formed a perfect impression of its quotidian contents right down to leaves in the thatch roofs and cereal grains in the kitchen containers, was the fallout and surge and mud from the Avellino eruption of Vesuvius.
Claude Albore Livadie, a French archaeologist who published the initial report on the Nola discovery, dubbed it "a first Pompeii. During May and June , provincial archaeological authorities oversaw excavation of the site.
Mastrolorenzo hurried out to Nola, about 18 miles 29 kilometers east of Naples. He and Pappalardo took samples of the ash and volcanic deposits, which contained chemical clues to the magnitude of the eruption. But then the scientific story veered off into the familiar opera buffa of Italian archaeology. The owner of the site agitated for construction of the supermarket to resume or to be compensated for the delay—not an unusual dilemma in a country where the backhoes and bulldozers of a modern economy clang against the ubiquitous remains of ancient civilizations.
Government archaeologists hastily excavated the site and removed the objects. As it turns out, the supermarket was never built, and all that remains of a site that miraculously captured one of civilization's earliest encounters with volcanic destruction is a hole in the ground on a vacant, weed-choked lot, the foundation walls of the huts barely visible. A small, weathered sign proclaiming the "Pompeii of Prehistory" hangs limply from a padlocked gate.
The sad archaeological scenario of Nola has repeated itself several times. In , an Italian construction company under contract to the U. Navy base in the southern Mediterranean uncovered another ash-covered village near the modern town of Gricignano di Aversa; it was, according to Mastrolorenzo, even more extensive than the Nola site, with traces of numerous Copper and Bronze Age huts. In the summer of , during construction of the new high-speed railroad line between Naples and Rome, thousands of human footprints were uncovered near the town of Afragola.
Geologic analysis established that they were the footprints of Bronze Age inhabitants fleeing the Avellino event. The threesome rushed to photograph the vivid residue of that ancient terror. Despite the loss of these sites, Mastrolorenzo, Petrone, Pappalardo, and American volcanologist Michael Sheridan triggered worldwide fascination when they summarized these findings in the spring of in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS.
But their research went beyond mere archaeological documentation. The Avellino event, they wrote, "caused a social-demographic collapse and the abandonment of the entire area for centuries. In the world before Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami, these warnings might have sounded as remote and transitory as those prehistoric footsteps.
Not anymore. There are many ways for a human being to die after a volcano erupts, and a blast like the one Vesuvius unleashed in B. One of the bags contained a fine white powder, the ash that blanketed the fallout zone; the other was full of small rocks, no more than an inch or two in diameter. Some of the rocks were pumice, pebbles honeycombed with bubbles and nearly as light as Ping-Pong balls; others were dense and hard.
The first hint of the Avellino eruption of Vesuvius emerged in the early s when volcanologists identified pumice deposits underneath the A. But in recent years Mastrolorenzo, Pappalardo, and their colleagues, analyzing everything from meters-thick ash deposits visible in road cuts to micron-thin slices of volcanic crystals viewed in a scanning electron microscope, have reconstructed the Avellino event in harrowing detail.
Some eruptions ooze lava in picturesque, slow-moving streams. But in an event like Avellino, the conduit of the volcano is so tightly corked by solid rock that it takes an enormous amount of pressure building up from below, in the magma chamber, to blow a hole to the surface. When it does, the violence of the explosion—the boato, Italian for the enormous roar—propels liquid rock into the air so fast that it breaks the sound barrier, unleashing a sonic boom.
During the Avellino eruption, the boato accompanied a blast that hurled nearly , tons a second of superheated rock, cinders, and ash into the stratosphere. It reached an altitude of about 22 miles 35 kilometers —roughly three times the cruising altitude of commercial airliners. As this incredible cloud of material rose, it spread at the top, assuming the classic shape—classic ever since Pliny the Younger first described it in a letter to the Roman historian Tacitus about the later eruption that buried Pompeii—of an umbrella pine tree, the iconic feature of a plinian eruption.
Prevailing winds out of the west carried the bulk of the initial fallout in a northeasterly direction, toward Nola and Avellino, where pumice and lapilli deposits piled up as high as nine feet three meters near the volcano in several hours.
The column of ash may have hovered in the air for up to 12 hours. Then it collapsed, producing an apocalyptic sequence of events that makes a plinian eruption one of the most lethal natural disasters on Earth.
When a plinian column falls upon itself, it creates a pyroclastic surge—a boiling, turbulent avalanche of debris that shoots out sideways from the slopes of a volcano. This searing cloud can travel for many miles, initially at great speed. Not too many humans have seen much less survived a pyroclastic surge at close quarters, but many of us have an image of its horrifying power burned into our memories: It shares many physical properties with the huge clouds of powder and ash produced by the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in The initial surge of the Avellino eruption, especially in the zones closest to Vesuvius, was instantly lethal.
The entire countryside surrounding Vesuvius was covered by foot upon foot of this powder, 65 feet 20 meters deep at a distance of three miles five kilometers from the crater to about ten inches 25 centimeters thick at a distance of 15 miles 24 kilometers. Eight inches 20 centimeters of ash is enough to cause modern roofs to collapse. The sizzling temperature of a Vesuvian surge has emerged as a key factor in explaining what happened at Pompeii and Herculaneum in the next great eruption, 1, years later.
In a grim bit of forensic paleoanthropology, Petrone and Mastrolorenzo reconstructed a parting picture of the victims huddled inside fornici 5, 10, and The heat would have boiled their brain tissue, which would then have burst out in small, scalding explosions that left blue-black burn marks on the bone.
Moisture from vaporized flesh and blood combined with volcanic ash in the surge to create a protective, plasterlike material that preserved the bones, and from the posture of the skeletons they could determine that victims in the fornici died instantly. Petrone keeps samples of the bones, along with the San Paolo Bel Sito skeletons, in several large shopping bags in his office. The pyroclastic surge is just the first part of the one-two punch delivered by the collapse of a plinian column.
When the vast amount of solid ash and debris mixes with steam fed by underground aquifers, a violent microclimate of pitched thunderstorms and torrential rains occurs, producing great mudflows. It has not erupted since then, but Vesuvius is an active volcano, it will erupt again. The oldest dated rock at Mt Vesuvius is about , years old. It was collected from a well drilled near the volcano.
Vesuvius erupted catastrophically in 79 A. The Somma Rim, a caldera-like structure formed by the collapse of a stratovolcano about 17, year ago, flanks Vesuvius to the east. The 79 A. Essentially, that was what the discovery of the city of Pompeii was like. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A. In this guide, discover the history surrounding this famous volcano, as well as interesting Mount Vesuvius facts. In the last 17, years, the volcano has had eight major eruptions. The eruption in A.
Why is Mount Vesuvius famous? Though the A. Ironically, the thing that led to the death of so many is what keeps their stories alive today. Mount Vesuvius formed due to the collision of the Eurasian and African tectonic plates, roughly around 25, years ago. Though several eruptions occurred prior to A. Much of the destruction has not even been repaired, come the 79 eruption.
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