© Yale Center for British Art, Collection Paul Mellon. View of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, from the bay of Naples, as imagined by the artist William Turner between 1817 and 1820.
According to a multidisciplinary team of geoarchaeologists, archaeologists and geochemists, the eruption destroyed the water supply system in the bay of Naples. This mainly consisted of a stone aqueduct (the longest in the Roman world) completed by a dense network of lead pipes. It was replaced by a new system after around fifteen years of work.
Almost two thousand years after the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, certain periods of the history of Naples have just been reconstructed. Until now, historians and archaeologists had wondered about the impact of this volcanic eruption on the Aqua Augusta aqueduct which supplied Naples and neighboring cities with water. Recent geochemical analyses have made it possible to directly link the lead in the water pipes of the period with that trapped in the sediments of the old port of Naples. Results clearly show that the hydraulic network had been destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and that it took around fifteen years to replace it. These findings are the subject of an article published in the journal PNAS on May 16 2016 by the laboratory Archéorient – environnements et sociétés de l'Orient ancien (CNRS/Université Lumière Lyon 2)
1 and Laboratoire de géologie de Lyon: Terre, planètes et environnement (CNRS/ENS Lyon/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1), in collaboration with University of Glasgow, University of Southampton and Universita' degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
2. During the construction of a new underground line, archaeological excavations were carried out in the ancient, long-buried port of Naples. They made it possible to study a six-meter thick deposit of sediment layers accumulated in the port over centuries.
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