Heraculeum, Wisconsin.

Well, no.  There is no such town in Wisconsin, but we do have a Sparta, a Troy and a diminutive Rome, so its not entirely implausible.  But Heraculeum would have been considered bad luck.  It was one of the communities destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

Its the less famous cousin of Pompei.  But conditions at Heraculeum were a bit different.  Without getting too far into the technical weeds, Heraculeam was hit with a blast of heat so rapid that all the oxygen vanished, leaving organic material to be preserved, albeit in a charred state.

Most famously, an ancient library was discovered at the Villa of the Papyri.  The conservation challenges associated with preserving, unrolling and reading 1800 priceless ancient scrolls are considerable.  Suffice it to say that it can be done.  Slowly.  Carefully.  Imperfectly.

But getting back to Wisconsin.  I had a fun geocache on the banks of the Chippewa River.  It had photos and information on a local historic landmark.  I had it nestled inside an odd bit of hollow masonry.  Imagine my surprise when a geocacher reported back that they had found it.  Incinerated.

I've had caches be chopped up by loggers, swiped by kids, swept away by high water.  But this was a new one.  You see, it turns out that somebody had built a fire ring out of the abundant rubble on the banks.  Including.....

Yep.  The poor geocache was still inside the masonry.  And very much the worse for its roasting.

Charred PVC pipe.  Entirely melted on one end.  The darker, crispier part on top was a metal fastener that of course transmitted even more heat.  Looks bad, but hey, if scrolls can withstand a volcanic eruption........

Let's saw it open.

Remarkably there were things still intact inside.  The melted plastic is a ziploc that had contained the photos and sign in log.  Geocachers use these as moisture is the bane of geocaches.  Well, this was the driest geocache log in recorded history!

Some of the photo could still be made out.  Its of the dam just up stream.

And the log.  I'll have to post this on the local geocaching site.  If there is not a Hall of Fame yet, this should start one.

There are lots of videos out there on how they Xrayed the scrolls and used some very sophisticated software to reconstruct the text without the need to unroll these delicate items.  Here's a short overview.  It's pretty amazing.