Buried deeper than Pompeii
Herculaneum stood on a headland by the sea, about 7 kilometres west of Vesuvius, while Pompeii lay further south-east. It was a smaller town, of perhaps a few thousand people, with fine houses facing the bay. During the eruption of 79 CE it received little falling pumice. Instead it was struck by a series of pyroclastic currents, fast avalanches of hot gas and ash, which buried it under more than 15 metres of material that later hardened into rock.
Wood, bread and a cradle
The heat of the flows charred organic materials instead of burning them away, and the hard deposit sealed them from air and water. As a result Herculaneum has kept what Pompeii lost: carbonised wooden doors, beds, shelves, stairs and even a folding wooden partition in the house named after it. Food survived too, including a round loaf of bread stamped with the name of Celer, the slave of a man called Quintus Granius Verus. A wooden cradle was found in one of the houses.
Houses with upper floors
At Pompeii most buildings stop at the ground floor. At Herculaneum many keep their upper storeys, balconies and roof beams, so you can walk through streets that still look closed in. The streets meet at right angles in a regular grid of blocks, a pattern common in Roman town planning. The houses are richly decorated: the House of Neptune and Amphitrite has a wall mosaic of the two sea gods in glass tesserae, and the House of the Stags is named after its marble statues of deer attacked by dogs. Together they show how much of Roman art was made for private homes.
The people on the beach
For a long time Herculaneum seemed almost empty of victims, and many assumed its people had escaped. That changed in the 1980s and 1990s, when excavations on the ancient shoreline found the remains of more than 300 people in the vaulted boathouses and on the beach. They had fled to the sea, perhaps hoping for rescue by boat, and died there. Their bones have since told scientists a great deal about the health, diet and age of the town’s inhabitants. Since 2024 visitors can walk on the ancient beach itself.
A library under the ash
Just outside the town lies a luxury villa named after what was found in it in 1752: about 1,800 carbonised papyrus scrolls, the only library of the classical world found where it was kept. Most look like lumps of charcoal and fall apart when opened, and for two centuries scholars could read only fragments. In recent years scans and computer analysis have begun to reveal text inside rolled scrolls without unrolling them. The Villa of the Papyri itself is still mostly underground.
Digging out a buried town
Well diggers struck the theatre in 1738, and the Bourbon kings of Naples began exploring the town through tunnels, removing statues and paintings for their collections. Work stopped in 1765, partly because the modern town above complained. Open excavation began in 1927 under the archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri and went on until 1961; most of what visitors see today was uncovered then. Much of Herculaneum still lies beneath modern Ercolano. Since 1997 it has been part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site with Pompeii and Oplontis.
Where to see it
The excavations are in Ercolano, on the southern edge of Naples, a short walk from the Ercolano Scavi station of the Circumvesuviana railway. Many finds, including the bread and the paintings removed in the eighteenth century, are in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.
Sources
- Parco archeologico di Ercolano, history of the site.
- Herculaneum Conservation Project and University of Oxford, “The Story of Herculaneum”.
- Getty Conservation Institute, “Herculaneum: overview”.
- British Museum, Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum (exhibition, 2013).
- A. Wallace-Hadrill, Herculaneum: Past and Future (London, 2011).
