Probing an Ancient Natural Catastrophe

"I do think -- and this is speculation -- that they likely suffocated rather than died of the heat."
"Our individuals were in these kind of sealed, trapped stone oven-type things, whereas his individual was in a regular building -- much more exposed and much more directly affected by the pyroclastic flow itself."
"Bone is a composite material of about 30 per cent organic material like collagen and about 70 per cent inorganic material like calcium, phosphates and the like. The two structures are very tightly connected within the bone – they have to extract the collagen from the bones to be studied which is a very complicated process."
"It [the temperature] came out quite low, lower than we expected. It surprised us how much collagen we had left over… from the unique environment of the bodies being in the fornici."
"You have people who are hiding, sheltering, in these stone boat houses and there is only one way in or out, so when that pyroclastic material comes down the hill or the sea it is going to cover that up and people would be trapped in there. Whether those boathouses fill with debris or ash or don’t, either way you’re stuck in there in a dark, cave environment with the heat increasing as well."
"What is interesting about Herculaneum is that it was some distance from Vesuvius, which means they saw the eruption and had a chance to try and escape, they all ran down to the beach to get in the boats and escape – although it was futile." 
"These methods really contribute to our understanding of death fire and heat."
Tim Thompson, professor, Applied Biological Anthropology, Teeside University, England

"While their analysis is intriguing, I do not think they have proved it is human brain material, nor have they ruled out other origins."
"This new work shows that researchers should renew their investigations into the causes and manner of death at Opiontis, Pompeii and other Vesuvian-area sites."
Kristina Killgrove, Bioarchaeologist, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The snow-covered peak of Mount Vesuvius volcano is framed by ancient ruins of the archaeological excavations of Pompeii, Italy, on Jan. 23, 2019. (Cesare Abbate / ANSA via AP)

In the field of bioarchaeology it has long been believed that those who lived in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. were instantly calcified by extreme heat. Newly published, two studies place that theory in doubt, as new evidence has been revealed indicating that the eruption on Vesuvius may have claimed lives in a manner that departs from the prevailing hypothesis that their blood and brains became vaporized through the pyroclastic flow's extremely ferocious heat.

Some researchers now propose that at least one of the individuals preserved from that ancient catastrophe had his brain turned to glass.

When on August 24 of that fateful year in antiquity, the sight of the awful eruption warned those below that they must take action as a fast-moving, dense, extreme-heated surge of ash, gas and rock slide down the mountain, Herculaneum's seaside residents fled for their boats. Infants and children were bundled into the stone boathouses, followed by women, and then men, desperately seeking shelter from the heat-ravages of the fast-moving pyroclastic flow.

Photo: Lancevortex/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0

The remains of 340 people have been dug out of the ancient clay since 1980. Some of them were those people who had fled for shelter to the boathouses, and some on the beach. The stone shelters they sought haven in were known as fornici. One set of researchers published their findings in the journal Antiquity, challenging the hypothesis of vaporization as the mode of death experienced by these unfortunate people.

The condition of the bones of those in the fornici, according to the researchers, suggest they had been protected from instant death both through the stone structure sheltering them and the condition of their own body tissue mass providing insulation against the intense heat of the flow. So instant death failed to deliver them from agony presumably, which instead visited them through suffocation or asphyxiation.

The second team had results they published in the New England Journal of Medicine, with the claim that the pyroclastic flow's intense heat had vitrifid the brain of at least one victim, who had been in a bed, in a building in the centre of the city. His brain, according to the research headed by Dr. Pier Paolo Petrone, a professor of human osteobiology and forensic anthropology at the Federico II University Hospital in Naples, Italy, had turned to glass as a result of the pressure of extreme heat.

Photo: Daniele Florio/Wikimedia Commons

The first team had studied the ribs of 152 individuals discovered in six of the 12 boathouses, focusing on crystal microstructures in the bones which had responded to thermal exposure, and the amount of collagen remaining. Data indicated people in the boathouses were exposed to temperatures of around 260 degrees Celsius. One reason for the results discovered, according to Dr.Thompson, was the protection afforded them through the stone boathouses, the other the very presence of that many people in each shelter. Which protection did nothing to preserve their lives, only to prolong the agony they suffered.

They would have been trapped by debris piling up at the exits of the boathouses as the pyroclastic flow blasted the beach. The rising heat first baked, and then preserved their remains for posterity. The team in the second study focused on a man found in the Collegium Augustalium, on the main street of Herculaneum, the building some distance from the seaside. Dr. Petrone, a forensic anthropologist, and co-author of the study, pointed out that his brain had turned to glass, resulting from the high heat, when the victim's skull exploded.

The difference between the two conclusions; victims at the seaside and the one on the main street, feels Dr.Thompson, lies in the shelters each was found within. The conclusions between the two studies may have differed, but do not quite contradict one another, in his accounting. The man whom the second team studied had shards of glassy black material within remnants of the exploded skull and scattered among the remains of the cranial cavity; his shelter left him vulnerable to that result.

Anthropologist Valeria Amoretti looks at a skeleton of a victim of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, which destroyed the ancient town of Pompeii, at Pompeii's archeological site, near Naples, on Tuesday, May 29, 2018. (Ciro Fusco/ANSA via AP)