Mount Vesuvius Boiled Its Victims' Blood and Caused Their Skulls to Explode [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

A new study of residue on skeletons from the 79 A.D. eruption indicates Herculaneum was hit with a 400 to 900 degree pyroclastic flow

By Jason Daley
SMITHSONIAN.COM
OCTOBER 10, 2018

In 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius erupted, blanketing the nearby Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in hot ash and preserving the casualties in lifelike poses. And as awful as being smothered by ash may be, a new study suggests that suffocation wasn’t the cause of death for many victims.

Archaeologists have found that some people perished in a pyroclastic surge, a wave of superheated gas and hot ash that literally boiled their blood and caused their skulls to explode, reports Neel V. Patel at Popular Science.

The evidence comes from boat houses in Herculaneum, a seaside resort town for wealthy Romans about 11 miles from Pompeii. In the 1980s and 1990s, archaeologists began uncovering the remains of several hundred people who had huddled in the shelters at the water’s edge to wait out the eruption. For hours the volcano, which had not erupted for hundreds of years, shot ash and chunks of pumice into the air, causing many people to evacuate or to seek shelter in solid structures. But it appears that a flow of superheated gas rolled down the mountainside at hundreds of miles per hour and blindsided the people in the waterfront chambers.

The new study, published in the journal PLoS One, presents more evidence that the boat house victims were killed by heat, not suffocating ash fall. George Dvorsky at Gizmodo reports that researchers examined 100 samples of bones and skulls using special types of spectrometry that can detect very low concentrations of minerals. The team looked at strange red and black residues found on the bones, determining that they had unusually high concentrations of iron. Those types of concentrations occur in two types of situations: when metal objects are subjected to high heat, and when blood is boiled away.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mount-vesuvius-boiled-its-victims-blood-and-caused-their-skulls-explode-180970504/#7cgXx2uST3lVXCGu.99