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Village found that was preserved by Mount Vesuvius eruption 2,000 years before Pompeii

Footprints of fleeing adults and children were also well preserved.

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(Pastorius via Wikimedia Commons)

By Danny Halpin via SWNS

A Bronze Age village preserved when Vesuvius erupted 2,000 years before Pompeii has been discovered.

Afragola was uncovered during the construction of a high-speed railway near Naples and archaeologists have said it offers a rare glimpse into Early Bronze Age life in the Campania region.

Like Pompeii, Afragola was encased in meters of ash, mud and silt, which preserved the site so well that researchers could even tell the season in which the disaster occurred from the remains of a food store.

Footprints of fleeing adults and children were also well preserved.

Covering an area of 5,000 square meters, the village is one of the most extensively investigated sites of the Early Bronze Age in Italy.

Dr. Tiziana Matarazzo of the University of Connecticut said: “The reason we found the site is because of the construction of a high-speed train line.

“The site is exceptional because Afragola was buried by a gigantic eruption of Vesuvius and it tells us a lot about the people who lived there, and the local habitat.

"In this case, by finding fruits and agricultural materials, we were able to identify the season of the eruption, which is usually impossible."

The course of eruption happened in various phases, starting with a massive explosion that sent debris away from the village, to the northeast.

This gave the villagers a chance to escape, which is why preserved footprints were discovered and not bodies as at Pompeii before the wind changed and ash blew over the village.

(Pietro Fabris via Wikimedia Commons)

Dr. Matarazzo said: “The last phase brought mostly ash and water – called the phreatomagmatic phase — mainly dispersed to the west and northwest up to a distance of about 25km from the volcano.

“This last phase is also what completely buried the village. The thick layer of volcanic material replaced the molecules of the vegetal macro-remains and produced perfect casts in a material called cinerite.”

These conditions meant the materials were resistant to degradation, even after several millennia.

Dr. Matarazzo added: “Leaves that were in the woods nearby were also covered by mud and ash which was not super-hot, so we have beautiful imprints of the leaves in the cinerite.”

The village offers a rare glimpse at how people lived in Italy in the Early Bronze Age, according to the researchers.

Dr. Matarazzo said: “In Campania at this time, we have huts, but in Greece, they had palaces. These people probably lived in groups with maybe one or more persons was the head of the group.”

There was also one storage building in the village where all the grains and various agricultural goods and fruits were gathered from nearby woods to be stored and likely shared with the whole community.

Unlike the other huts in the village, the plant food warehouse caught fire, probably from a pyroclastic flow.

It collapsed and carbonized the stored vegetables inside and preserved the remains for thousands of years.

The evidence suggests the eruption happened in the autumn, as the villagers amassed their food stores from the nearby woods.

Imprints of leaves found at the base of trees and ripe fruit also point toward this season.

Dr. Matarazzo said the Bronze Age Campanian Plain was home to a rich diversity of food sources, including a variety of grains and barley, hazelnuts, acorns, wild apples, dogwood, pomegranates, and cornelian cherry, all extraordinarily well-preserved in the aftermath of the volcanic eruption.

She also said that future research will focus on animal bones found on site, including goats, pigs and fish, as well as footprints, adding: “This eruption was so extraordinary that it changed the climate for many years afterward.

“The column of the Plinian eruption rose to basically the flight altitude of airplanes. It was unbelievable.

“The cover of ash was so deep that it left the site untouched for 4,000 years — no one even knew it was there. Now we get to learn about the people who lived there and tell their stories.”

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