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Article: Pompeii's burial not its first disaster.(Archaeology)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- November 27, 2004
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Recent excavations reveal that the ancient city of Pompeii, famed for its burial by an eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, suffered through several devastating landslides in the centuries preceding its volcanic demise.
About three-fourths of Pompeii has been excavated, says Jean-Daniel Stanley of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. However, most of the digs in the city have extended down only to the ground level of dwellings that were standing in the 1st century. In the past couple of years, deeper digs in the oldest part of Pompeii--as well as core drilling nearby--have exposed layers of jumbled sediment that suggest that the ...