An ancient, charred scroll being scanned. (Credit: University of Kentucky) When Mount Vesuvius exploded in 79 A.D., it buried the surrounding country, including the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum so quickly and completely that organic matter didn't have time to burn. Instead, it transformed into carbon. While this was bad news for the inhabitants of the region, it was good news for historians: it preserved some of their papyrus scrolls as carbonized tubes — true carbon copies. The only problem with these artifacts is that most cannot be read, as unrolling them would cause them to crumble and disintegrate.
Now, a group of researchers in France has made a key finding that could unlock the secrets of these scrolls for good. Using the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, researchers bombarded scrolls from a villa in the town of Herculaneum with extremely high-intensity X-rays, in a process called scanning X-ray fluorescence. This ...
