Frozen People in Roman Pompeii
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A prehistoric village has been unearthed
in Italy, more than 3,500 years after it was buried by Mount
Vesuvius, the same way the Roman city of Pompeii was destroyed
centuries later.
Experts call the find at Nola, near Naples, “sensational” and say
the site could be the world’s best preserved early Bronze Age
village. Professor Stefano De Caro, the head archaeologist for the
area, says it’s a “new Pompeii,” with everyday life frozen in a
suspended state, just as it was in Pompeii in 79 AD.
The site is north of both Pompeii and Vesuvius, and it looks as
if the community was thriving when it was surprised by the eruption.
“We knew that Vesuvius erupted a number of times, before and after
Pompeii, including in particular in about 1750 BC,” says De Caro.
Wooden structures in the village were destroyed by the heat but
the mud that filled the buildings created a natural mold, revealing
everything that was inside them. “What we found was a plaster-cast
mold…of the village in reverse,” De Caro says. “It was very
emotional to see and very instructive. Before this we had only holes
in the ground where stakes had been, to show us what a Bronze Age
village had been like. It is also the first time we have found such
detail, and the first site where we have found everything together -
the dead, the living, dwellings, crafts, customs, food.”
Among the items found were the bones of hams, a hat decorated
with the teeth of a wild boar and a cage which had been raised six
feet off the ground - probably to protect it from dogs – that
contained the remains of pregnant goats. “We also found a kiln with
a pot still inside it that was being fired,” says De Caro. “In other
words, we found life in progress.”
In the remains of the later destruction of the city of Pompeii,
there are human bodies that were covered with lava, frozen in the
act of trying to escape from the volcano. Archaeologists now believe
that a man and a woman whose skeletons were dug up five years ago in
the area of this new discovery were the remains of people trying to
escape from the prehistoric village during the eruption that
occurred then.
To learn more about this, read “Catastrophobia” by Barbara Hand
Clow,click
here.
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