Town buried by volcano in 1815 found

The remains of a village, and its inhabitants, destroyed by a volcano nearly 200 years ago have been uncovered under 10 feet of volcanic ash on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa.

The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora was the largest in recorded history, spewing enough dust into the atmosphere to cause "The Year without a Summer" across the world the next year, with temperatures falling and crops dying. The eruption buried perhaps 10,000 people, preserving their homes and remains, much like what happened to Italy's Pompeii, says volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson of the University of Rhode Island in Narragansett. Pompeii was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

Sailors hundreds of miles away saw ash fall on their ships and felt the eruption, which was about 200 times more powerful than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. Once nearly 14,000 feet tall, Mount Tambora now stands at about 9,200 feet in elevation.

Sigurdsson and colleagues from Indonesia's Directorate of Volcanology and the University of North Carolina announced Monday results of a six-week investigation, conducted in 2004 at a site 16 miles west of the volcano. The team excavated a hut on stilts, with two bodies preserved inside. Everything at the site had been turned into charcoal by the heat, preserving wood, people and other materials. "We saw a time capsule," he says.

Victims of the volcano likely died where they stood, as super-heated ash and sulfurous gas clouds raced ahead of the eruption. Eventually 117,000 people in the region died, most of them from disease, according to the Danish scholar Bernice de Jong Boers.

"Certainly this was the kind of eruption that would bury very extensive areas," says volcanologist John Pallister of the U.S. Geologic Survey.

"One question is how much it preserved."

Radar images from below the surface at the site indicate that an entire village, including a central palace, is there. "Not a lot is known about this corner of the world from that time," Siggurdson says. His team originally came to Sumbawa to explore the central caldera of the volcano. (A caldera is a large depression at the top of a volcano, caused by such an eruption.)

But reports by a local guide of the existence of a "museum" gully that was shedding bits of pottery led them to the dig site.

Surprisingly, pottery and bronze pots from the dig site indicate the local people were of Southeast Asian descent, not the more typical Indonesian peoples. Their village was three miles inland to protect them from pirates, Sigurdsson says, but its location left them vulnerable to the eruption. He speculates that an entire kingdom of people was buried there.

It may be "a bit of hyperbole to speak of a kingdom, but what they've excavated is probably just the first of more villages to come," University of Washington volcanologist Chris Newhall says by e-mail.

Next year, the discovery team hopes to continue its exploration of the village. Steps to preserve the site must be taken immediately, Siggurdson says. "You don't find something like this very often."