Of all end times tales, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. must rank near the top. The conflagration, which volcanologists say lasted 32 hours, reduced the vibrant Roman resort town of Pompeii to a scorched ruin empty of people and buried in ashy drifts as high as 30 feet.
Some 20,000 to 30,000 people lived in and around Pompeii; historical evidence suggests that most fled during the early stages of the disaster. Excavations dating back to 1748 have unearthed roughly 1,300 victims; most of the fatalities are believed to have occurred on the second day — 19 hours after the initial blast — when superheated clouds of ash and gas called pyroclastic flows engulfed residents who had stayed behind.
Today, an archaeological park at the site draws as many as four million visitors a year. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the park’s director general, has said that the focus on the physical eruption “monopolized” the city’s historical memory. But new excavations reframe Pompeii as a testament to human survival and adaptability, not just annihilation.
A study led by Dr. Zuchtriegel, published this summer in The E-Journal of the Excavations of Pompeii, corroborated a theory that has slowly taken shape over the last 100 years. Artifacts discovered during recent digs in the Insula Meridionalis, a neighborhood in the city’s southern quarter, revealed that an invisible, post-eruption city of what Dr. Zuchtriegel terms “outcasts and underdogs” lived among the ruins for centuries, inhabiting the upper floors of buildings that were tall enough to poke through the piles of volcanic ash.
In an interview, Dr. Zuchtriegel said that while archaeologists were aware of clues of Pompeii’s reoccupation, they tended to disregard them. The rush to find well-preserved Roman artifacts meant that the “faint traces” of scattered settlements were cleared away without being documented, he said.
The new study proposes that the refugees were joined by new arrivals who came to salvage what they could from the entombed city. “I think it’s quite normal that people would try to return as soon as possible, not only to dig for these objects but because there was little else to do,” Dr. Zuchtriegel said.
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The post After Vesuvius Buried Pompeii, Some Survivors Moved Back In appeared first on New York Times.
