DOUGAL JERRAM: My first impressions of when I arrived at Pompeii was
surprise at the scale of the city.
You can see streets, columns, statues.
It really was clearly a vibrant place.
And yet you look to one side and it stares you in the face.
There's the volcano,
Mount Vesuvius, shadowing over the whole area.
These people were living by this mountain,
and this mountain ended up being their doom.
(EXPLODES)
The destruction of Pompeii has really captured people's imagination.
Particularly with the preserved bodies.
Thousands frozen in time at the very moment of a horrifying death.
But what's really quite surprising is when they uncovered the town of Herculaneum,
the town much closer to the volcano than Pompeii,
they found very, very few bodies, and that's a really intriguing question.
Why so few bodies in Herculaneum,
and why so many in Pompeii?
DR. LUANA TONIOLO: It was not just an excavation,
but something like a detective story.
It was really incredible.
PIER PAOLO PETRONE: I saw hundreds of skeletons.
Who were these people?
And how did they die?
JERRAM: On the flanks of this fearsome volcano,
what really was the key to life and death?
REPORTER 1: Pompeii archaeologists made the discovery
of what they term as "an exceptionally rare find."
REPORTER 2: This is the latest in a series of fascinating discoveries
that excavations at Pompeii have yielded in recent years.
(TONIOLO SPEAKING)
DR. GABRIEL ZUCHTRIEGEL: What's special in Pompeii
is that you're looking
not at single works of art,
or not even single monuments, that it's all part of a city.
And a city that was inhabited by people.
I started to study archaeology because I was interested
not so much in ancient art, but in history.
So how did people live?
There was one discovery that sparked interest around the world.
It was really something very, very extraordinary.
It all started with the police discovering an underground network of tunnels.
Tomb raiders broke through the wall,
searching for precious objects and wall paintings
to take away and sell them on the illegal market for antiquities.
They were caught in action and the excavation started.
Outside the city of Pompeii, there are many villas,
but many of them had been excavated illegally.
So this is a great opportunity to do a scientific excavation of such a site.
The villa was first excavated in the early 20th century,
but we had an extremely fragmented view of this site
and actually didn't really know the importance of the villa until 2017.
Nothing prepared us for what we would discover.
ZUCHTRIEGEL: While the organic material were dissolving,
the imprints remained in the soil,
and now as we, as archaeologists, come across this,
we know it's important to stop excavating,
and we fill it with plaster.
The technique of the plaster casts
allows us to reconstruct that which is not there anymore.
Then we get the imprint of animals, and sometimes also humans.
ZUCHTRIEGEL: The new excavations continued there
and started to bring to light
something we'd never seen before.
It was of an extraordinary luxury,
with decoration in gold and silver and bronze.
It was a really incredible chariot.
It was really a great surprise.
But right next to it, there was a room
which really, for me, is maybe the most touching
and moving discovery I've made as an archaeologist.
This was a part of the villa which was formerly totally unknown.
There's no treasury here in terms of gold and silver and precious vases.
But what is really special about this room
is that we have the plaster casts of three beds.
But they are really simple, simple beds.
Very ordinary.
DR. SOPHIE HAY: When I heard about the discovery of that room in the villa,
I knew it was something special.
Nothing like this has been found before.
When I arrived in Pompeii, I had obviously seen photographs,
but there's nothing quite like arriving on site.
It felt about as close as you could to time travel.
So this is a really unusual scene to witness.
This is the small room just near the stable.
I mean, you can see how cramped it is.
We expect there to be great wealth in these suburban villas,
and here we see a room with bare walls, a bit of white plaster, very simple.
There's no mosaics on the floor.
It sort of seems like it's just packed earth.
So, it's sort of a little bit of a mystery
as to what this room was because it's...
Doesn't really fit our picture of a lavish suburban villa.
Not the elite part of the house at all.
We're looking at very much a sort of a working room,
a service room, if you like.
They brought amphoras, and this is a steering mechanism,
probably from the chariot found in front of the door.
And then you have all kinds of materials
from the bridle and things linked to the horses.
So, it was a workplace, but it was also a living place.
What we see here is really the most humble level of society.
So it probably was a slave room.
And there were at least three slaves living here, sleeping here.
HAY: It's an absolutely incredible find.
These are the invisible people in the Roman period.
It's quite emotional, looking at and seeing,
feeling so close to their lives.
One third of the population were probably enslaved people.
Their jobs would range from shopkeeping to sex work.
So we've got a lot of range here.
But then suddenly we get this magnifying glass
of their lives at this villa.
There's three beds in the room.
One of the beds is slightly smaller than the other two, suggesting
maybe there was a child, so it could have been a family unit of enslaved people.
At this point, the excavation hadn't found any bodies.
So everyone is wondering what happened to the inhabitants.
(TONIOLO SPEAKING)
This villa really presents us with a sort of detective story,
which is essentially what archaeology is.
So this image is really important because it gives you a real sense
of the context in which these two people were found.
They've basically gone down to the lowest point
they could in the villa, in the cryptoporticus,
so it's an underground passage.
It shows how desperate they must have been
at the time to take shelter and cover from the eruption.
Clearly, sheltering here provided no protection.
So the big question is, how did they die?
JERRAM: The only way to find out what happened in the villa
is to work out how the volcanic eruption unfolded.
Witnessing an eruptive volcano is really an assault on the senses.
It's terrifying, but also mesmerizing.
When I first went to Vesuvius, I was really hooked from day one.
It turns out there's some really tantalizing details in one letter,
written by a man called Pliny the Younger, a Roman,
to an historian friend of his.
He witnessed the eruption, and according to Pliny's letters,
the eruption started around midday.
You almost get a picture of what it must have been like just seconds before.
And bang!
He says, "Tall, broad flames blazed from several places on Vesuvius
"and glared out through the darkness.
"It was daylight everywhere else,
"but it was blacker and denser than any night.
"After a while, the darkness paled into smoke,
"but the sun shone as wanly as during an eclipse."
What we've been realizing, particularly from the way Pliny described it,
it was almost sort of 20, 24 hours worth of process that went on.
The very first stage was this big explosive phase.
And that immediately sent up this "strange cloud," as Pliny described it.
Big column of material that went high up into the atmosphere.
What Pliny doesn't tell us is exactly what happened next inside Pompeii,
and also the other towns around Vesuvius.
But luckily, the volcano has left its own detailed record
of the events on that day, and I'm going to dig into it.
I really wanted to see whether the eyewitness accounts actually match up
with the deposits and the debris that we see that buried the towns.
And it's by doing this that we can hopefully start to pinpoint
what happened during the eruption, hour by hour.
At the southern tip of Pompeii,
this spot is one of the few places left where you can still see
some of the layers of the volcanic deposits.
When people think of volcanoes, they often think of these sort of
mesmerizing red lava flows making their way down the mountain.
But actually, that didn't happen with the Mount Vesuvius eruption.
What we see in the different parts of the layers
tell us something about how the eruption took place.
And when we start to look at the deposit,
I mean, you can see the first sort of a couple of meters here,
things aren't really being destroyed.
All of these pots are totally as they were standing around at the time.
And that's because all of this deposit here is what we call the "fall deposit."
It's stuff that was coming out of the sky.
It first started with this, what we call white pumice.
So this very, very light material was raining out of the sky
from this big cloud, this big eruptive cloud that Pliny described.
And when we try and sort of unravel the timeline here,
essentially from where my feet are, up until this change
from this sort of white pumice to the gray pumice,
this represents the volcano sort of starting
about 1:00 in the afternoon, up until round about midnight.
Clearly it's a very strange environment to be in.
It's like a snowstorm, but it would be really dark.
You've got ash floating around in the air.
There may be fires started
by some of the hotter material that's landing.
Quite a terrifying experience.
It's difficult to imagine what it would be like being caught up in this.
How do you survive it?
When it starts raining these pumice stones,
the natural reaction is just to search cover somewhere.
This becomes a deadly trap.
People can't get out of the doors anymore because they are blocked by pumice stones.
One of the things that's really striking is just the visual difference
between the layers here.
You can actually see one on top of another, some of them
almost like a stack of cards, showing you that there's a sideways movement.
There's a current, there's a turbulent current that's deposited this here.
It tells us that something back at the volcano was changing.
This huge column of rock and ash that was bursting
its way up into the sky has now collapsed.
And you've got a dense, turbulent current of rocks, hot pumice and ash, hot gases,
all rolling over each other and barreling down the side of the mountain.
These things can be hundreds of degrees in heat,
and they can travel hundreds of miles an hour.
It's engulfing things as it goes along.
This is a pyroclastic flow.
The whole thing is chaotic.
It's a kind of angry stage in the eruption from this stuff falling
out of the sky to all of a sudden the pyroclastic flow coming in
and essentially just taking everything in its wake.
So many stories. People trying to escape outside Pompeii, some hiding.
And so those who did what seemed probably the wrong thing in the first moment,
to go through the rain of stones,
had probably the biggest chance to survive.
Those who stayed behind went right to their death
because there was no escape from the pyroclastic flow.
JERRAM: The devastation that was seen at Pompeii
has really captured people's imaginations,
particularly with the body molds that are preserved.
Thousands of people dying.
One of the things that's really puzzling
is that you've got lots of bodies preserved at Pompeii,
but closer to Mount Vesuvius in Herculaneum,
another place smothered by the eruption,
when they uncovered the city, they found very, very few bodies.
So the big question is, why was it so different there?
PETRONE: Pompeii is very famous all over the world.
But in the '90s, I had the opportunity to excavate victims in Herculaneum.
Mostly, anthropologists like me are used to just excavate graves,
from graveyards, but in this case, was completely different.
It was the first time that I could study and excavate
just the victims of a natural disaster.
In that case, an eruption.
Working on them, it's very, very important,
it's very unique because within the town,
we found just few victims.
Some 20-30 victims.
We thought that the large part of the inhabitants
of Herculaneum just, they escaped.
But that was an open question for decades.
Why just very few people were there?
In the '80s, the director of Herculaneum
started an open-air excavation in the town.
The excavators wanted to find victims.
They were asking themselves, "Where are people?"
They just start the excavation in the suburban area,
and 1981, they reached the beach.
They start to excavate on the beach area
and suddenly, they found something extraordinary.
During the excavation,
they just start to see that there were several chambers.
And later they saw that these boat chambers were just facing the sea.
And the finding within the boat chambers
was something very surprising and also exceptional.
There inside, they found a lot of victims.
In one room, you had maybe 40 skeletons.
They start to excavate on the beach area,
and then they found 30, 40 victims just laying on the beach.
Altogether, the victims found within the boat chambers
and on the beach are around 10 times more victims than in the town.
So, we wanted to know, who were these people?
And how did they die?
The excavation and the study of the victims was a very complicated job.
So imagine that you have altogether 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 bones.
So the first part of the job was just to recognize
a single individual and then to start to remove the ash.
That job we did with water.
And in that way, we could just see
all the skeletons all together and make a documentation
for each individual.
In Herculaneum, in the first deposit,
there are no big pumice like in Pompeii,
so this is quite different
in the two towns, in the two sites.
The ash is very fine.
So, it was very easy to excavate the victims.
But we don't know who were these people.
In this case, we found these two females,
just close to each other,
and between the legs of these two women,
there were found two small children.
And also what is interesting,
that through the analysis of DNA of these people,
we know that most of the women,
they are just local.
But many of males are coming from other localities,
like, for instance, the Mediterranean area,
Near East or Central Europe and so on.
So we wanted to know why
there is a mix of nationalities here in Herculaneum.
There was an intriguing clue.
This is chamber number 10 and here, this individual
is a male, 35 years old, about.
And we found a metal ring around the ankle.
And he was not the only one.
So it's sure they were slaves, and also we know that a lot of them,
a lot of people came from other countries.
So very probably they came at least as slaves.
The big question is, how did they die?
I saw hundreds of skeletons and victims, but never something like this.
Archaeologists, from long time, they always said and thought
that the people died all over
and all around Vesuvius, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and so on,
they died of suffocation because of the hot gases.
In some cases, they were found on one side
with hands on their faces to try to do the last breath.
But I found, in the boat chambers, evidence that didn't fit with this theory.
This is the skull of a victim found within a boat chamber,
and we have some reddish-brown
mineral residual within this skull,
so the brain was very rapidly boiling,
and that caused the skull to explode.
So now we know that people in the boat chambers
were not suffocated by ash and gas.
The temperatures was high enough to kill them instantly.
But bodies in Pompeii looks different to the ones in Herculaneum.
So does it mean that the pyroclastic flow was different here?
In Pompeii, many people show this
kind of pugilistic attitude, so it seems that you are
preparing yourself, just trying to defend yourself.
But it's not true.
It is something after you die.
You see that the bodies were just kept complete,
full of bones, flesh, everything.
In Herculaneum, you don't have this kind of attitude,
and that's due to the rapid disappearing of the flesh.
All evidence shows that the temperature
of the pyroclastic surge was much higher in Herculaneum than in Pompeii.
When I saw the corpses of victims in Herculaneum,
I thought that it was really a terrible situation at that time,
to see all these people, young people, children and so on,
all together, that was really something very unbelievable.
Very probably they didn't know
that Vesuvius was a volcano, but they knew very well earthquakes.
That's why they were just within the boat chambers,
because that was very safe from earthquakes,
but not in case of an eruption.
JERRAM: What is still puzzling to me is the difference between both towns.
Why so few bodies in Herculaneum?
And why so many in Pompeii?
You can see that there's this huge wall
of volcanic debris that came down off the volcano.
Some 60-plus feet of debris lying above my head.
But that just didn't happen in an instant.
When you look a bit closer, and I can see here,
you can actually see changes in the layers.
What it shows is not just one pyroclastic flow,
but a whole succession of them.
And what we can do is we can walk up through this layer cake of rock
and work out exactly how many of these pyroclastic flows came down
during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
The evidence here in this wall
shows us that there was at least six different pyroclastic flows.
And it's the first two that bury Herculaneum.
But they don't entirely reach Pompeii.
And that is a big clue as to what happened.
It was one volcano and one eruption,
but two different sequences of events in each city.
So what determined whether you lived or died?
And if you died, how you died?
(RUMBLING)
Now I can fully unravel the timeline of what happened
in the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
At around midday, the volcano erupted.
It's explosive, and it's more powerful than anything you can imagine.
Millions of tons of rock, pumice and ash are ejected,
forming a giant column of ash and debris towering 20 miles into the sky.
And it's by sheer bad luck that these stratospheric winds
take the debris, carry the debris over and drop it onto Pompeii.
Ash and pumice would continue to rain down for the next 18-20 hours,
trapping people inside their homes, like the two people found together
at the villa.
The first buildings start to collapse under the weight of the debris.
PETRONE: While people were just dying in Pompeii, we know, actually,
that most of Herculaneum was just evacuated.
They escaped in the north direction, through Naples.
JERRAM: Sadly, some stayed behind in Herculaneum
sheltered in the boat chambers.
Some 12 hours after the eruption, the ash column collapses.
The first pyroclastic flow travels at over 100 miles an hour
in the direction of Herculaneum.
So we know that the first pyroclastic surge came into the city,
went into the buildings, killed the people here in the town,
reached rapidly the beach,
and the temperature is at least 500° centigrade.
They died just in a fraction of a second. They had no time to react.
So the people didn't feel anything.
JERRAM: Over in Pompeii, things played out differently.
It's spared the first pyroclastic flow.
Instead, the city is pelted by a shower of pumice.
After 18 hours, the pumice fall starts to ease.
(TONIOLO SPEAKING)
JERRAM: But it's a short-lived period of calm
before Mount Vesuvius launches another pyroclastic flow.
(TONIOLO SPEAKING)
This pyroclastic flow does reach Pompeii.
It traveled further than the ones that hit Herculaneum,
so it was slightly cooler, but still lethal.
TONIOLO: They didn't know what was happening, and they died.
I worked in Pompeii for many years,
but this was very unique because here you really have
a very important and particular picture of 79 AD.
And this clearly was terrible.
It's the fourth and the fifth, and eventually the sixth
that completely cover the area, and it is, I mean,
even this preserved bit here is a harrowing scene.
Absolute chaos.