Bath Time - Where's My Rubber Duckie?

The Roman empire was an impressive beast. Some of the engineering marvels that they accomplished are absolutely staggering. Plumbing, concrete that would set up under water, aqueducts, and so on. While some things are quite obvious about the ancient Roman civilization, some things are still hard to discern.

For instance what did they like to eat? What was a favorite past time? Did they play games? Those are the kinds of things that can be really difficult to uncover. (It's easy to look at an aqueduct and figure out it's purpose.) Sometimes you get lucky and find some writings about what went on, however, even those can be incomplete pictures of the daily activities.

Researcher Alissa Whitmore, a doctoral candidate in archaeology at the university of Iowa has come up with an ingenious way to take a look at the habits of the Roman's while using the bath houses.

Pompeii Bath

By studying the material lost in the drain of these bath houses, they have been able to speculate about some of the activities that took place. They found the obvious items such as jewelry, perfume vials, and nail cleaners. They also found pieces of dish-ware and bones that suggest that they took meals at the baths. Additionally, they found teeth and a scalpel, suggesting that some medical procedures may have also taken place. 

Of course we will probably never know for sure all that went on at the baths, however, research such as Whitmore's is certainly giving us a better picture.

Here is the full article:

http://www.livescience.com/26202-drain-lost-items-roman-baths.html

-Red

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