Herculaneum sat on the Bay of Naples like a well-kept secret.
Pompeii, a few miles to the southeast, liked noise: traffic, commerce, crowds. Herculaneum was smaller, wealthier on average, and more intimate in scale, a town of fine houses, painted walls, colonnaded courtyards, and breezes that came off the water. From its terraces you could look out over the blue bay and, if you were the sort to look inland, up toward the green slopes of Vesuvius. The mountain was not an exotic menace in the Roman imagination. It was scenery. It was vineyards. It was the ordinary backdrop of a prosperous coast.
Then, in 79 CE, Vesuvius stopped being a mountain and became an event.
Our most famous witness was not in Herculaneum itself but across the bay at Misenum: Pliny the Younger, writing years later to Tacitus, trying to give posterity a clean account of a day that refused to be clean. He described an eruption column rising like a pine tree, swelling upward and outward, and the strange daylight that turned to darkness as ash spread across the sky. His letters also preserve the human impulse that runs through every disaster: the need to interpret what is happening in real time, with inadequate information, while the world is changing shape around you.
For Herculaneum, the catastrophe arrived differently than it did at Pompeii. Pompeii endured hours of falling pumice and ash, time enough for some to flee and for others to hesitate, to gather valuables, to make fatal choices slowly. Herculaneum’s end was swifter, more absolute, and more violent in its physics.
Sometime after the eruption began, pyroclastic surges, fast-moving clouds of scorching gas and volcanic debris, swept down toward the coast. One major line of scientific investigation, built on the grim evidence of bodies found near the ancient shoreline, argues that many of the people who had taken shelter there died almost instantly from extreme heat, a lethal thermal shock rather than slow suffocation. In a famous Nature paper, researchers interpreted victims’ postures and the nature of the deposits as signs of a sudden, overwhelming blast.
Later work pushed the temperature question even further into the realm of the unthinkable. A 2018 study examined biochemical traces and argued for exposure to intense heat consistent with rapid, catastrophic bodily effects at the moment of death. This is not the only way scholars have tried to explain exactly what happened to each individual, and the specifics remain debated, but the broader picture is hard to escape: Herculaneum was hit by something that gave little or no time for last-minute improvisation.
If you want to understand why Herculaneum matters so much to historians and archaeologists, you do not start with the horror. You start with what the town preserved.
Herculaneum was buried not just in ash but in deep volcanic deposits that, in many places, sealed buildings in a way that protected organic materials which normally rot into nothing. Wood survives. Furniture impressions survive. Carbonized food remains survive. Whole architectural elements stand with a kind of stunned dignity. The town became, in effect, a time capsule with a different set of contents than Pompeii’s.
And then there is the Villa of the Papyri: the closest thing we have to a surviving library from the Greco-Roman world, its scrolls carbonized by the eruption and long thought unreadable. For generations, scholars could only stare at those blackened coils and imagine what voices they contained.
Now the voices are beginning, cautiously, to come back.
Recent breakthroughs using imaging and machine learning have started extracting text without physically unrolling the fragile papyri. Some of this work has been public-facing, even competitive, a blend of scholarship and technical ingenuity aimed at recovering lost literature from the volcanic wreckage. The point is not the spectacle of “AI reads ancient scroll.” The point is that Herculaneum still has new primary sources to yield, two millennia after the eruption.
Even the calendar date of the eruption, once repeated with textbook confidence, has become a case study in how historical certainty is made and unmade. Medieval manuscript traditions of Pliny’s account long supported an August date, but archaeological and volcanological arguments have increasingly favored an autumn eruption, pointing to finds associated with a later season and to other lines of evidence. A substantial volcanology synthesis lays out the multidisciplinary case for a later timeframe, and the broader scholarly conversation continues to refine what “79 CE” really means in the rhythms of harvest, weather, and daily life.
Herculaneum’s afterlife has been as complicated as its death.
Because what Vesuvius preserved, time, weather, tourism, and earlier excavation practices have threatened. Modern conservation has become a long campaign rather than a single heroic effort. The Herculaneum Conservation Project, launched in the early 2000s in partnership with major philanthropic support and anchored in international expertise, has tried to do something rare in archaeology: treat the site not as a quarry of artifacts, but as a living problem of preservation, documentation, and public responsibility.
So when you walk Herculaneum in the mind, you should resist the temptation to see it only as a cautionary tableau. It is that, of course. But it is also a portrait of Roman domestic life with unusual clarity, a reminder that the ancient world was built of perishable things like wood and cloth and food and ink, and that we almost never get to see those things. Vesuvius, in a cruel paradox, destroyed Herculaneum and then guarded it.
That is why the town keeps pulling scholars back. Not because it is frozen, but because it is still, in a quiet way, unfolding.