History

The first excavations at Herculaneum were financed by Charles of Bourbon (future Charles III of Spain), beginning in 1738 — eight years before Pompeii. The early work was destructive: tunnels were driven through the solidified pyroclastic rock to extract art objects for the royal collections at Portici (the Museo Ercolanese, now in Naples). The systematic open-air excavation of the site began only in 1927 under Amedeo Maiuri, who directed work until 1961 and established the approach of exposing entire blocks rather than tunnelling.

The Herculaneum Conservation Project (2001–2012), a joint initiative of the Packard Humanities Institute and the Italian Ministry of Culture, addressed a conservation crisis — the decaying building fabric — and established new standards for site management. From this work emerged the current approach of stabilising standing structures while continuing selective excavation.

The Villa of the Papyri, a vast suburban villa extending west of the excavated area and still only partially explored, yielded approximately 1,800 carbonised papyrus scrolls in the eighteenth-century tunnels. Most were Greek philosophical texts of the Epicurean school, including works by Philodemus of Gadara. The Herculaneum Papyri are now partially readable through multispectral imaging and, since 2023, AI-assisted decipherment via the Vesuvius Challenge.