Earthquakes made eruption at Pompeii even more deadly

The excavation of 2 skeletons with severe fracture and trauma injuries has provided new insights into the destruction of Pompeii.

A new study in Frontiers in Earth Science reports the injuries are consistent with building collapse caused by earthquakes that would have shaken the ground as Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE.

“We proved that seismicity during the eruption played a significant role in the destruction of Pompeii and, possibly, influenced the choices of the Pompeiians who faced an inevitable death,” says Domenico Sparice, a volcanologist at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) Osservatorio Vesuviano in Italy, and first author of the Frontiers in Earth Science study.

Excavations in the ‘casa dei Pittori al Lavoro’ (house of the Painters at Work) in Pompeii revealed something was different about how this building had collapsed.

“We found peculiar characteristics that were inconsistent with the effects of volcanic phenomena described in the volcanological literature devoted to Pompeii,” says co-author Mauro Di Vito, a volcanologist and director of INGV-Osservatorio Vesuviano.

“There had to be a different explanation.”

The researchers uncovered 2 male skeletons, both about 50 years old. Their positioning suggests that ‘individual 1’ was suddenly crushed by the collapse of a large wall fragment, resulting in immediate death. ‘Individual 2’ may have tried to protect himself with a round wooden object, of which the researchers found rotted traces in the volcanic deposits.

These individuals were positioned on top of the pumice lapilli – small rock and ash particles that fell for about 18 hours during the first “Plinian” phase of the eruption. Thanks to the only surviving written testimony of the eruption, written by Pliny the Younger, we know that it started at around 1pm and lasted for 2 days.

Co-author of the new paper, Valeria Amoretti, an anthropologist who heads the Applied Research Laboratory of Pompeii Archaeological Park, says: “The people who did not flee their shelters were possibly overwhelmed by earthquake-induced collapses of already overburdened buildings. This was the fate of the two individuals we recovered.”