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TOPIC: Herculaneum
Blobrana


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Herculaneum painted Roman statue
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A 2000-year-old painted Roman statue is being digitally restored to her original glory by scientists from the University of Southampton and the Herculaneum Conservation Project with the University of Warwick.
The head of the statue was discovered in the ancient ruins of Herculaneum in 2006, a town preserved in the same eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried nearby Pompeii in AD 79, during works by the Herculaneum Conservation Project in the area of the Roman basilica.
The statue is believed to represent a wounded Amazon warrior, complete with painted hair and eyes. The organic pigments are exceptionally well-preserved because of the particular nature of Herculaneum's burial under volcanic ash.

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Blobrana


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Herculaneum
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Few things fuel the imagination like the story of a long-lost and forgotten city that somehow gets found. And as archaeological tales go, there's probably no better one than that of this ancient town in the Campania region of southern Italy. Just ask anyone who's ever made it through elementary school.
When Mount Vesuvius suddenly erupted in A.D. 79, it spewed a mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke, ash and molten lava some 20 miles into the sky, plunging Pompeii -- a thriving commercial center with about 20,000 residents -- into darkness. As prevailing winds caused the volcanic matter to rain down on the city and cover it in a thick layer of pumice and ash, fast-moving avalanches of boiling gas and dust poured down the side of the mountain. Floors and roofs collapsed, and the people of Pompeii, along with the temples, baths, brothels and countless other buildings they had built in the Roman tradition, were buried under up to 25 feet of debris.

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Blobrana


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Remains of rotten fish entrails have helped establish the precise dating of Pompeiis destruction, as 79 A.D., according to the analysis of the towns last batch of garum, a pungent, fish-based sauce.
According to a report in Discovery News, frozen in time by the catastrophic eruption that covered Pompeii and nearby towns nearly 2,000 years ago with nine to 20 feet of hot ash and pumice, the desiccated remains were found at the bottom of seven jars.

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Blobrana


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Vesuvius
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The residents of Naples could be forgiven for sleeping uneasily.
The city in southern Italy sits in the shadow of the volcanic Mount Vesuvius, whose eruption buried the Roman city of Pompeii in the year 79AD.
Vesuvius last erupted in 1944, but a study by a team of Italian and French scientists published in the journal Nature suggests there could be more activity to come.

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Blobrana


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RE: Herculaneum
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Beyond Pompeii: Places swallowed by Vesuvius
Three lesser-known sites show more clearly the volcano's destructive might.

Over several centuries, millions of tourists have visited Pompeii to acquaint themselves with the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that began on Aug. 24, 79 A.D. But while it's the most famous eruption site, the ancient Roman city 15 miles south of Naples isn't the best place to gauge the volcano's awesome destructive power.

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Blobrana


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Businesses and residents in the neighbourhood of Europes most notorious volcano are ill-prepared for a potentially catastrophic eruption that experts say could occur at any time.
The next eruption of Mount Vesuvius near Naples, Italy may be impossible to predict, but experts agree that if it occurs anytime soon, the destruction will be enormous and much of the population in Naples and the surrounding region will face it with little preparation.

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Blobrana


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In an attempt to recover the lost works of Aristotle, Sophocles and Catullus, archaeologists are to restart excavations at the ancient city of Herculaneum in Italy, where a Roman library lies buried beneath 90 ft of lava from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

"It is impossible, absolutely impossible, to excavate Villa dei Papyri without finding fantastic things. We may find the lost scrolls of Aristotle, or we may find something even more exciting that we had not even thought of yet" - Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, the Director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project.

The enormous villa, just outside Herculaneum, belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso who's Julius Caesar's father-in-law. Around 1,800 scrolls of middling importance have been found since the library was discovered 250 years back.
Archaeologists have only recently discovered two extra floors to the building but the work on the site halted in 1999 because of fears about the conservation of the site.

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