TY  - JOUR
A1  - Petrone, Pierpaolo
A1  - Pucci, Piero
A1  - Vergara, Alessandro
A1  - Amoresano, Angela
A1  - Birolo, Leila
A1  - Pane, Francesca
A1  - Sirano, Francesco
A1  - Niola, Massimo
A1  - Buccelli, Claudio
A1  - Graziano, Vincenzo
T1  - A hypothesis of sudden body fluid vaporization in the 79 AD victims of Vesuvius
T2  - PLoS one
N2  - In AD 79 the town of Herculaneum was suddenly hit and overwhelmed by volcanic ash-avalanches that killed all its remaining residents, as also occurred in Pompeii and other settlements as far as 20 kilometers from Vesuvius. New investigations on the victims' skeletons unearthed from the ash deposit filling 12 waterfront chambers have now revealed widespread preservation of atypical red and black mineral residues encrusting the bones, which also impregnate the ash filling the intracranial cavity and the ash-bed encasing the skeletons. Here we show the unique detection of large amounts of iron and iron oxides from such residues, as revealed by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and Raman microspectroscopy, thought to be the final products of heme iron upon thermal decomposition. The extraordinarily rare preservation of significant putative evidence of hemoprotein thermal degradation from the eruption victims strongly suggests the rapid vaporization of body fluids and soft tissues of people at death due to exposure to extreme heat.
KW  - Skull
KW  - Volcanoes
KW  - Skeleton
KW  - Bone fracture
KW  - Iron oxides
KW  - Bone
KW  - Archaeology
KW  - Magnetite
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/52549
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-525490
SN  - 1932-6203
N1  - Copyright: © 2018 Petrone et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
VL  - 13
IS  - (9): e0203210
SP  - 1
EP  - 27
PB  - PLoS
CY  - Lawrence, Kan.
ER  -