Nearly 2,000 years ago, a young man aged about 20 was chilling out in the Collegium Augustalium, a hall built to worship Emperor Augustus, in the Roman town of Herculaneum. Nobody knows what was running through his mind that morning, but we know what was there by the afternoon: A heat-shocked brain preserved in organic glass.
This unlucky fellow was one of the thousands of people killed when Mount Vesuvius blew its ever-lovin’ top in the year 79, burying the neighboring towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in searing ash, lava, and pumice.
By way of 404 Media