A lot of what we think about history can come from the most high-profile aspects of it, the stuff from which hit movies and best-selling books can be drawn. Epic battles, religious conflicts and the troubled reigns of monarchs all come to mind. But there’s another, more humble, strain of envisioning life in the past, and it’s an approach that involves considering all aspects of human life. All of that is a roundabout way of saying that ancient bathrooms — and what people left behind in them — can tell us plenty about how societies operated hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
A paper published earlier this month in the journal nps Heritage Science chronicled a discovery made while exhuming chamber pots in what was then known as Moesia Inferior. In the time of the Roman Empire, Moesia encompassed a significant amount of land in eastern Europe, including parts of what is now Albania, Ukraine and Kosovo. Then, as now, people needed to go to the bathroom, and it turns out there’s plenty to uncover from the sites where they did so.
The paper’s authors described their goal as “[identifying] intestinal parasites present in individuals using chamber pots in Novae and Marcianopolis” and comparing those findings to comparable ones from other Ancient Roman sites. In doing so, they had another task ahead of them as well: “reconstructing the sanitary habits” of residents of the region in bygone times.
Their findings included the conclusion that chamber pots used by locals were generally utilized by “roughly three to six elderly individuals or four to eight young adults during the night.” They compare this to the use of public restrooms elsewhere in the Roman Empire, something else archaeologists have studied extensively in recent years. The researchers found evidence of intestinal parasites in some of the sites they explored; at others, that evidence was absent.
Ancient Rome Had a Sin City at the Bottom of the Sea
Baia was the Las Vegas of the Roman Empire.Among the other findings made by the archaeologists was the discovery of the oldest known human infection by one particular parasite, Cryptosporidium. (Yes, the same one at the center of an all-time great The Onion article.) As Kristina Killgrove reports at Live Science, the parasite was found in multiple chamber pots in the settlement of Novae, located in what is now Bulgaria. “The parasite’s presence across distinct contexts suggests the infection may have been relatively widespread within that community,” one of the study’s authors, Elena Klenina, told Live Science.
Photo credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
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