It might have been a bad thing to be a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian’s Wall around the 3rd century AD. W. H. Auden imagined potentially harsh conditions in his poem “Roman wall blues“, in which a soldier laments the damp wind and rain with “lice in my jacket and cold in my nose.” We can now add chronic nausea and bouts of diarrhea to the list of potential problems, thanks to parasitic infections, according to a new study published in the Journal of Parasitology.
As mentioned previously, archaeologists can learn a lot by studying the remains of intestinal parasites in ancient feces. For example, in 2022, we reported on an analysis of soil samples collected from a stone toilet found inside the ruins of a 7th-century BC palatial villa outside Jerusalem. This analysis revealed the presence of parasitic eggs from four different species: whipworm, beef/pork tapeworm, roundworm, and pinworm. (It is the oldest record of roundworms and pinworms in ancient Israel.)
Later that same year, researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of British Columbia analyzed remains found on an ancient Roman ceramic vessel excavated at the site of a 5th-century AD Roman villa in Geras, a rural area in Sicily. They identified eggs of intestinal parasitic worms that are commonly found in feces, strong evidence that the 1,500-year-old vessel was most likely used as a chamber vessel.
Other previous studies have compared fecal parasites found in hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies, revealing dramatic dietary changes, as well as shifts in settlement patterns and social organization coinciding with the advent of agriculture. This latest paper analyzes sediments collected from sewer drains in a Roman fort in Vindolandalocated south of the defensive fortification known as Hadrian’s Wall.
An antiquarian named William Camden recorded the existence of the ruins in a treatise in 1586. Over the next two hundred years, several people visited the site, discovering a military bathhouse in 1702 and an altar in 1715. Another altar found in 1914 confirmed that the fort was called Vindolanda. Serious archaeological excavations at the site began in the 1930s. The site is famous for the so-called vindolanda tablets, Among the oldest surviving handwritten documents in the United Kingdom – and for Discovery 2023 For what appeared to be an ancient Roman dildo, although others have argued that the penis-shaped artifact was more likely a diagonal spindle used to spin thread.