Doctor's kit found on Mount Vesuvius victim in Pompeii - Live Science

One of several papyrus scrolls before carbonization and (b) after carbonization. Carbonized scroll produced with tight packing of layers and waviness that will challenge unrolling algorithms. Credit: Seiler et al., 2026, PLOS One, CC0Researchers recreated a damaged ancient scroll to test a new way to study the past. Lead in ancient ink could help researchers read the Herculaneum papyri, Roman scrolls buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. Many are now too brittle to open, and reading them with X-rays poses its own problem. The ink and papyrus are both carbon-based, making the writing difficult to distinguish from the material beneath it. Researchers have found lead in some letters on fragments from the scroll collection. Because X-rays can distinguish lead from papyrus more easily, a team tested whether the metal could help reveal writing inside similarly damaged scrolls. They made their own versions, wrote on them with ink containing different concentrations of lead, and subjected them to intense heat. Scans then allowed them to recover some of the words. The findings appeared in the open access journal PLOS One.

Using X-ray technologies and custom-made software, researchers were able to read text they wrote on a fake ancient scroll designed to mimic those destroyed at Herculaneum in A.D. 79.

Pompeii is a tale that you’ve probably heard before. It’s one of the most famous from the ancient Roman world: a deadly volcanic eruption that destroyed an entire city – now an eerie tourist site and archaeological treasure trove. But, while many of us vaguely know what happened when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, there’s still so much we could learn from this tragedy.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Pliny the Younger documented what he witnessed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii and killing his uncle, Pliny the Elder. His account did more than preserve the story of one of history's most famous volcanic disasters. It also recorded enough information about when the eruption occurred to give modern scientists an unusually precise historical reference point for testing volcanic dating techniques. Researchers from the Berkeley Geochronology Center, UC Berkeley and the University of Padua in Italy now report in Science Advances that this historical benchmark has helped them significantly improve the precision of argon-argon dating. By calibrating the method against the inferred eruption date of Aug. 24, 79 CE, they have strengthened what is already one of the most widely useful tools for determining the ages of rocks and volcanic events.