Pompeii ruins show that the Romans invented the science recycling

They were expert engineers, running ahead of the underground heating curve, waterways and using concrete as building materials. Now it turns out that the Romans were also masters in recycling their waste.

Researchers in Pompeii, the city buried under a thick carpet of volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, found that huge piles of trash that appeared to have been dumped outside the city walls were actually “staging areas for cycling and reuse cycles”.

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Professor Alison Emerson, an American academic who belongs to a large team working in Pompeii, said that garbage was stacked along the entire outer wall on the northern side of the city, among other locations. Some hills were several meters high and included pieces of ceramic and stucco, which could be reused as building materials.

Emerson said that these hills were previously thought to have formed when the city earthquake struck about 17 years before the volcano erupted. Most of them were erased in the mid-twentieth century, but some are still being discovered.

Scientific analysis has now tracked some waste from city sites to the equivalent suburban sediments of modern landfills, and back to the city, where materials have been incorporated into buildings, such as flooring.

With his fellow archaeologists Stephen Ellis and Kevin Dickus, who worked on the excavations of Cincinnati University, Emerson studied how to build the ancient city. We found that part of the city was built of garbage. The piles outside the fences were not disposed of for disposal. They are outside the walls that are collected and sorted for resale inside the walls. “

The suburb of Porta Ercolano is outside the northern wall of Pompeii. When the area was excavated, old garbage was found piled in and around cemeteries, homes, and shops. Photography: Alison Emerson

Pompeii was an elegant villa townhouse, beautiful public buildings, open courtyards, craft stores, bars, brothels, and bathrooms. It included a runway that hosted wrestling games for fans up to 20,000.

When “volcanic dust spilled from Vesuvius” across the earth – as one witness wrote – enveloping the city in the dark, at least 2,000 people died. In 1748, a group of explorers discovered the city almost perfectly preserved under a solid ash and pumice rug. Even archaeologists later found a loaf of bread.

Pompeii is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site – and in normal times – it attracts 2.5 million visitors every year.

Emerson and her colleagues used soil samples to track the movement of garbage through the city. She said: “The soil we dig into varies depending on where the trash was originally left.” “Leaves garbage dumped in places such as latrines or cesspits behind rich organic soil. By contrast, waste accumulated over time in the streets or in hills outside the city leads to more sandy soil.

“The difference in the soil allows us to know whether the garbage was generated in the place where it was found, or was collected from another place for reuse and recycling.”

Some of the walls, for example, included reused materials such as cut tiles, broken amphora, slurry blocks, and plaster. She said: “Almost all of these walls have received a final layer of plaster, masking the clutter of the materials inside.”

A mural depicting the distribution of bread from Tablenum in Pompeii. Photo: DEA / L Pedicini / De Agostini via Getty

The idea was that all this garbage resulted from that earthquake – which consists of rubble cleared from the city and dumped outside the wall to be removed from everyday life. When I was working outside Pompeii, I saw that the city extended to developed neighborhoods outside the walls … so it didn’t make sense to me that these suburbs were also used as landfills. “

She added that modern methods of waste management focus on removing garbage from our daily lives. “For the most part, we don’t care what happens to our waste, as long as it is disposed of. What I found in Pompeii is a completely different priority, as the waste is collected and sorted for recycling.

“Pompeian lived much closer to their waste than most of us would find acceptable, not because the city lacked the infrastructure and did not bother to manage garbage but because their urban management systems were organized around different principles.

This point is related to the recent garbage crisis. Countries that manage their waste more effectively have applied a copy of the old model, with priority given to commodities rather than simple removal.

Alison Emerson, who studies classical studies at Tulane University, New Orleans, is the author of “Life and Death in the Roman Suburb”, which will be published by Oxford University Press next month.

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