Seven Thousand Tons of What???

Seven thousand tons of shit doesn't really sound terribly exciting unless you're a dung beetle with a glandular condition. For a certain type of scatologically inclined archaeologist, however, it is the best thing since sliced bread. Of course its entirely possible that some of it was sliced bread. This is no ordinary shit, this is Roman shit.

Apparently when Mount Vesuvius blew its top in 79AD one of the things preserved under the ash was the contents of a sewer in Herculaneum. Archaeologists are now sifting, somewhat gingerly one suspects, through the contents of said sewer to gain a better understanding of how ordinary Romans lived and more specifically what they ate. Apparently they ate dormice.

Off topic slightly, how fortuitous was the eruption of Vesuvius? Not for the people directly involved of course; for them it was a hideous disaster full of screaming, darkened skies, falling ash and the death of loved ones. People must have been shitting dormice all over the place. From a distance of a couple of millennia though we can be grateful that the eruption preserved things so well. It is amazing how much of our knowledge of ancient times comes from freak occurrences which stopped the usual processes of decay and demolition from happening.

Since we owe the preservation of Pompeii and Herculaneum to the eruption of Vesuvius it is interesting to note how we treat more contemporary volcanic ash clouds. Do we go into paroxysms of delight at the thought of Icelandic and Chilean culture being preserved throughout the ages. No, we bitch and whine about our travel plans being wrecked. I wonder if anybody living in Roman times saw the plume of ash rising from Vesuvius and thought, "That's going to bugger up the arrival of the grain fleet". Actually, being Roman and therefore practical, somebody probably did.

Nevertheless we seem to have very little regard for the problems that future archaeologists are going to encounter when they try to find out what life was like in our times. Nowadays when disaster threatens we selfishly evacuate the area, carrying whatever we can and when the danger has receded we either repair the structures in the area and go on using them or demolish them completely. Don't even get me started on recycling. As recycling takes a greater and greater hold on our society we will be leaving less and less behind to remember us by. Even sewage is being recycled these days and one can see the trend increasing. There will be no conveniently preserved sewers for the archaeologists of the future to sift through.

I genuinely believe that in a couple of centuries time it will be almost impossible to find any evidence that the human race existed as recently as a few decades before the time of checking. Everything will have been recycled into something new. Good for the planet yes but modern history is going to be a bit of a bitch to study. For archaeologists the eruption of Mt Vesuvius was a blessing in disguise. Well, for archaeologists and the dormouse population of central Italy.