CASE FILE: Herculaneum Uncovered
THE SCENE: The Bay of Naples
LEAD DETECTIVE: Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
SECRETS OF THE DEAD: Herculaneum Uncovered takes viewers to Italy’s bustling, picturesque Bay of Naples, where, in A.D. 79, Mount Vesuvius exploded, entombing the city of Pompeii and its doomed inhabitants in pumice and ash. Last year, some 2.5 million tourists visited the ancient Roman city and its famous casts of bodies that suffered a slow and suffocating death.
Just a few miles away is Herculaneum, the other, lesser-known victim of Vesuvius, where people experienced a different, more grisly death in the grip of superheated pyroclastic flows from the volcano. Those flows transformed the living, breathing city of Herculaneum into an astonishing time capsule that is even better preserved than Pompeii. Secrets of the Dead documents Dr. Wallace-Hadrill’s conservation efforts and explores how people lived — and the shocking way they died — in Herculaneum.