Herculaneum

Herculaneum was a Roman town on the Bay of Naples in Italy, buried along with the larger city of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, though its burial by fast moving pyroclastic flows rather than falling ash left the site with a notably different, and often better preserved, record of organic material such as wooden furniture, roof beams and even papyrus scrolls. Systematic excavation began in 1738 under the patronage of Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples, making Herculaneum along with Pompeii one of the earliest large scale archaeological excavations in the modern sense. Its most celebrated structure is the Villa of the Papyri, a luxurious seaside residence whose library of carbonized papyrus scrolls has been the subject of long running efforts to read their contents without physically unrolling them. Because much of the ancient town lies beneath the modern city of Ercolano, only a portion of Herculaneum has ever been excavated. The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997 alongside Pompeii.