Exploring what really happened at Herculaneum following the eruption of Vesuvius. Pompeii, the lost Roman city buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD, has long been a source of fascination to archaeologists. But its sister city Herculaneum, buried in the same eruption but to a much greater depth than Pompeii, reveals far more detail of how the Romans lived. For many years the city appeared to have been abandoned and it was assumed the inhabitants had managed to escape in the hours before Herculaneum was engulfed by the volcano. Then in the 1980s a macabre discovery was made. Burrowing through the volcanic mud, archaeologists found hundreds of bodies huddled pitifully together.