Later the Greeks moved east from Cumae to Neapolis, the New City, a little farther along t

he coast where modern Naples now stands. We have a very good idea what life in this sun-splashed land was like during the Roman era because of the recovered splendor of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But as the well-trod earth of Campania continues to yield ancient secrets, Mastrolorenzo and Petrone, with their colleague Lucia Pappalardo, have put together a rich view of an earlier time and what may have been humankind's first encounter with the primal force of Vesuvius.

Almost all has come to light by chance. In May 2001, for example, construction workers began digging the foundation for a supermarket next to a desolate, weed-strewn intersection just outside the town of Nola. An archaeologist working for the province of Naples noticed several trances of burned wood a few feet below the surface, an indication of earlier human habitation. At 19 feet below, relicts of a perfectly preserved Early Bronze Age village began to emerge.

Over the next several months, the excavation unearthed three large prehistoric dwellings: horseshoe shaped huts with clearly demarked entrances, living areas, and the equivalent of kitchens. Researchers found dozens of pots, pottery plates, and crude hourglass-shaped canisters that still contained fossilized traces of almonds, flour, grain, acorns, olive-pits, even mushrooms. Simple partitions separated the rooms; one hut had what appeared to be a loft. The tracks of goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs, as well as their human masters, crisscrossed the yard outside. The skeletons of nine pregnant goats lay in an enclosed area that included an animal pen. If a skeleton can be said to cower, the bones of an apparently terrified dog huddled under the eaves of one roof. What preserved this prehistoric village, what formed a perfect impression of its quotidian contents right down to leaves in the thatch roofs and cereal grains in the kitchen containers, was the fallout and surge and mud from the Avellino eruption of Vesuvius. Claude Albore Livadie, a French archaeologist who published the initial report on the Nola discovery, dubbed it "a first Pompeii".

During May and June 2001, provincial archaeological authorities oversaw excavation of the site Mastrolorenzo hurried out to Nola, about 18 miles east of Naples. He and Pappalardo took samples of the ash and volcanic deposits, which contained chemical clues to the magnitude of the eruption. But then the scientific story veered off into the familiar opera buffa of Italian archaeology. The owner of the site agitated for construction of the supermarket to resume or to be compensated for the delay—not an unusual dilemma in a country where the backhoes and bulldozers of a modern economy clang against the ubiquitous remains of ancient civilizations.

Government archaeologists hastily excavated the site and removed the objects. As it turns out, the supermarket was never built, and all that remains of a site that miraculously captured one of civilization's earliest encounters with volcanic destruction is a hole in the ground on a vacant, weed-choked lot, the foundation walls of the huts barely visible. A small, weathered sign proclaiming the "Pompeii of Prehistory" hangs limply from a padlocked gate.

Despite the loss of Nola as well as some other archaeological sites, Mastrolorenzo, Petrone, Pappalardo, and American volcanologist Michael Sheridan triggered world wide fascination when they summarized these findings in the spring of 2006 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). But their research went beyond mere archaeological documentation. The Avellino event, they wrote, "caused a social-demographic collapse and abandonment of the entire area for centuries. " The new findings, along with computer models, show that an Avellino-size eruption would unleash a concentric wave of destruction that could devastate Na

A．made artware.

B．grew crops.

C．tended flocks.

D．lived with their livestock.