Pompeii's burial not its first disaster Sid Perkins From Denver, at a meeting of the Geological Society of America Recent excavations reveal that the ancient city of Pompeii, famed for its burial by an eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, suffered through several devastating landslides in the centuries preceding its volcanic demise. About three-fourths of Pompeii has been excavated, says Jean-Daniel Stanley of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. However, most of the digs in the city have extended down only to the ground level of dwellings that were standing in the 1st century. In...