2023-08-25 09:58:33
The eruption of Vesuvius of the 1st century AD continues to animate the debate within the scientific community. After considering instantaneous deaths due to hot gases, a new study returns to the original hypothesis.
It was August 24, 79: Vesuvius covered Pompeii with several meters of lapilli, lava stones and ashes. Since the end of the 17th century, archaeologists have been fascinated by this submerged city, and for the 15,000 victims. The first thesis concludes that they were asphyxiated in the ashes. But in 2020, a new study favors instant death: the combustion of hot gases would have vaporized their bodily fluids.
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The Spanish study, published today in Plos One, returns to the original thesis: suffocation. If the first perished crushed in the houses, the vast majority managed to flee to the gates of the city before being overtaken, in the second phase of the eruption, by hot ashes and lava. These are the ones that were used for the study.
A detailed analysis of the bones of the victims
Almost 2,000 years after the disaster, researchers from the University of Valencia offer here the most detailed analysis of the bones of victims to date. In Pompeii you may know that these bones are found in plaster casts. Brilliant idea of an Italian archaeologist at the end of the 19th century who spotted air pockets in the rubble with, inside, human bones. He therefore injected plaster and reconstructed in 3D the shape of the bodies at the time of death. We see the faces, the teeth, the folds of the clothes.
Today’s study focuses on seven of these casts. The difficulty is that the plaster has damaged the bones. They therefore sought, with X-rays, the least damaged, and compared them with the bones of people cremated after their death, in a classic way, in different cemeteries. Conclusion: the chemical composition is identical, proof according to them, that the inhabitants of Pompeii are not “burned dead”, but that a fire then destroyed their bodies. Their stance “relaxed”, say the researchers, also suggests a slow death by suffocation, unlike the tense bodies, because seized in Herculaneum, the other city devastated that year. Casts from Pompeii show some covering themselves with their clothes, so as not to breathe in the ashes.
All these details may seem “grotesques”the authors of the study agree, but they explain that this work is important so that those who live near volcanoes today can understand whether to “to protect their home against ashes, falling rocks or lava, or hot gases”.
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