Summary
17 June 2011
Archaeologists have been discovering how Romans lived 2000 years ago, by studying what they left behind in their sewers. A team of experts has found out details about their diet and their illnesses.
Reporter:
Duncan Kennedy
Romans ate a lot of vegetables
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Report
This unconventional journey into the past took the team down into an ancient sewer below the town of Herculaneum. Along with neighbouring Pompeii, it was one of the settlements buried by the Vesuvius volcanic explosion of 79AD.
In a tunnel 86 metres long, they unearthed what's believed to be the largest deposit of human excrement ever found in the Roman world. The scientists have been able to study what foods people ate and what jobs they did, by matching the material to the buildings above, like shops and homes.
This unprecedented insight in to the diet and health of ancient Romans showed that they ate a lot of vegetables. One sample also contained a high white blood cell count, indicating, say researchers, the presence of a bacterial infection. The sewer also offered up items of pottery, a lamp and even a gold ring with a decorative gemstone. But it's the human remains that have most astonished the archaeologists, all going to prove that where there's muck, there's memory.
Duncan Kennedy, 大象传媒 News, Italy
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Vocabulary
- unconventional
unusual
- a sewer
a channel that carries away human waste
- the settlements
the areas where people lived in groups
- unearthed
discovered by digging
- excrement
solid human bodily waste
- matching
establishing a relationship between two things
- a high white blood cell count
an increased concentration of cells produced by the immune system that suggests the presence of an infection in the blood
- a bacterial infection
an invasion and multiplication of very small organisms that harm live tissue
- human remains
organic material left by the human body long after the person died
- muck
solid animal waste, dirt
