Headless Pompeii Victim Wasn’t Crushed to Death, After All

He was an unlucky person in an ill-fated
place: A man whose head was seemingly crushed by a massive boulder
as he fled Pompeii during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
Now, his head has been found, along with the reason for his death,
officials from the Pompeii Archaeological Park in Italy report^[1].

Archaeologists located the open-mouthed
skull near the unfortunate man’s body, which was unearthed in May^[2]. The find negates their
previous theory that the man was crushed by the stone block
(thought to be a door jamb) while trying to flee the second phase
of the eruption that preserved much of the ancient Roman city
beneath rock and ash.

“Now we know that the death was not due
to the impact of the block, but presumably from probable
asphyxiation due to the pyroclastic flow,” wrote the Pompeii
Archaeological Park on its Facebook
page^[3].

Not all volcanos produce lava. When Vesuvius erupted almost
2,000 years ago, it belched out a gigantic column of rock and ash.
The next day, pyroclastic flows rushed down the mountain, wiping
out massive swaths of land and life as they went.

Think of a pyroclastic flow as “a superheated hurricane-force
wind carrying ash and rock that can destroy almost anything in its
path,” says Benjamin Andrews^[4], director of the
Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program. They occur when
a volcano collapses or boils over, fueling a deadly river of gas,
ash, and rock that speeds down the side of the volcano with the
help of gravity and air flow. Andrews compares a pyroclastic flow
to a superheated sandblasting, with an occasional baseball- or
bowling ball-sized rock thrown in.

“If you are in a pyroclastic flow, you will almost certainly
die,” says Andrews. The Pompeiian man, who likely had a limp due to
a bone infection, didn’t stand a chance against the quick-moving
current of fire and debris. His lungs would have been no match for
the air that rushed down into Pompeii—it contained toxic gases as
hot as 1000°F.

Archaeologists found the skull at a lower level of the dig than
the man’s body, presumably because a tunnel dug during the first
excavation of Pompeii during the 1740s collapsed, taking the skull
with it.

Today’s excavation is a bit more advanced than the first
attempts to uncover the ancient city’s secrets. Archaeologists
recently began excavating Regio
V^[5], a part of northern
Pompeii that has yet to be fully explored. The excavation will
involve lasers, drones, and virtual reality visualizations, the
site’s director general told^[6]
an Italian wire service.

All the technology in the world can’t reconstruct exactly what
happened when Vesuvius erupted. But science tells us what the
unfortunate man would have seen when he looked up toward the
mountain. Imagine a “big terrifying cloud coming down the mountain
at you,” says Andrews, and you’ll get a good idea of what the man
saw during his last moments—while he still had his head.