Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #39: ANCIENT ROME with Darius Arya

Episode Date: March 2, 2024

Classical Archaeologist and TV host Dr. Darius Arya is back for a smologized version of this classic  episode to dish about priceless garbage piles, pottery graveyards, tomb discoveries, what's under European cities, ancient spa days, ingenious construction methods, and unlikely laundry techniques. Plus, what did ancient romans use before toilet paper - and perhaps more importantly, WHY?? Dr. Darius Arya's website, Twitter and InstagramA donation was made to AncientRomeLive.orgFull-length (*not* G-rated) Classical Archaeology episode + tons of science linksMore kid-friendly Smologies episodes!Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Steven Ray MorrisMade possible by work from Noel Dilworth, Susan Hale, Kelly R. Dwyer & Erin TalbertSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hey, it's your old Dad Ward von Podcast. Just slipping into your life to chat with you about ancient toilets, buried treasure, and Roman rulers. Welcome to another episode of Smologies. What are Smologies? You may be asking yourself, they're smaller cuts of our classic episodes and we cut them down and we cut out all the swear words so that they are classroom safe, they're kid-friendly, they're good for all ages.

This is a great episode. People love this one, so now you can listen to it as a curriculum or with my grandpa or whomever you like. If you want the full version, we're going to link it in the show notes. That's the longer version with all the squares left in, but this one, it's safe. Okay, enjoy. Okay, archaeology. Let's get into the etymology really quick. Archaeology comes from the Greek, archae for beginning, and classical archaeology deals

specifically with ancient Rome or ancient Greece. Boy, howdy, hot dang. Thisologist knows his business. He's an American who lives in Rome, so the dude is literally walking the talk, and he's the executive director of the American Institute for Roman Culture. And he's the host of a PBS series called Ancient Invisible Cities, as well as the Italian series called Under Italy, where he crawls into cool tunnels and tombs. It's very rad.

So a statement on his website just reads, my passion is Rome and it is not a lie. And like a plague in ancient times, it's infectious. So hang on to your togas and recline on your laurels to hear all kinds of dirt with classical archaeologist Dr. Darius Aria. Nologies. Nologies. Nologies. Nologies. Nologies. Nologies. Nologies.

Nologies. Nologies. Nologies. Nologies. Nologies. Nologies. Nologies. Nologies.

Nologies. Nologies. Nologies. It's out. Darius Aria sounds like a superhero name. Yeah. Almost Rhine's, which I've gotten that comment. Darius Aria. like a superhero name. Yeah, almost Rhimes, which I've gotten that kind of. Darius Arias.

Hello. Also known as D.R. What does an archaeologist do? If someone says, I'm an archaeologist, what does that mean? Because I feel like I think of dusty chinos and like worn boots and definitely a hat. Yeah, most archaeology isn't spending your time in the field. I mean, I can qualify that and say, okay, some people just do that all the time because they're like contract archaeologists.

So there's always something going on in Italy where some house is being built or some building is being restored or some road is being put in. And so they're always out in the field doing the excavation and that sense, urban development and so on or rescue operations. But generally speaking, you're studying the past.

So you're an Egyptologist or I'm a classical archaeologist. So I'm in the Mediterranean, I'm in central Europe, I'm where the Romans were. But generally speaking, the archaeologists will spend a lot of time in libraries. I'm here at the library using the resources of the Getty. And so it's some part in the field, but a lot of it is spent also piecing together a lot of different parts of history to form kind of a narrative or try to piece together a narrative that has parts missing. Yeah, exactly. So you're getting a wealth of information when you're excavating or doing some sort of

evaluative study. I mean, it could be non-invasive nowadays, but then you need to sift through the data. Like what you've now come up with, it has to make sense. Oh man, I love this part. Archeology is like a fascinating parfait of abandoned junk. Or if you're excavating, you know, you've unearthed different strata, different layers that people have left behind

and you've gone through the chronology backwards. So you're trying to piece it together, understanding from the beginning to the end. Of course, you're actually getting the most recent stuff first. So there's a bit of a puzzle there. And what kind of tools are you using? Take me through a dig. Okay. So what I'm concentrating on professionally has been the Roman era. And because Rome is not a place that's abandoned and it's continually been occupied, there are various layers that can be quite late. So, you know, for top layer of a site, well, I mean, it will be modern, you know, so there's going to be something, uh, just people deposits that people leave stuff behind. And it can be, you know, a Coke

bottle or a piece of barbed wire fencing. I mean, it could be something obviously like that. And then you're getting down into, actually in Rome and vicinity, the environs can be very, very rapid. Sometimes it's even as, it's been just shallow as say four or five inches. Awesome, boom, we're already hitting ancient material. Which is-

And where is this? Is this like in a construction site? Is this a puddle? No, so I've been, my excavations have been in really historic places that are well known like the Roman Forum, but then also an archaeological site called Ostia Antica. And Ostia Antica was the port city of Rome.

Basically Ostia was developed as the city at the mouth of the Tiber River. So you imagine this river flowing from the north through Rome and then dumping out into the Mediterranean. So this is a city located right about at the kneecap of Italy. It's right on the sea, and it's been abandoned for about 1,000 years. And it now kind of looks like grassland, taking over a grid of crumbling brick structures.

But in its heyday, it was this bustling port city and the seaside tourist town filled with government buildings and military fortifications, amphitheaters and residences, and ships carrying grains and other supplies would offload tons of goods to be stored and catalogued in warehouses, and then tugged upriver by little boats and then dragged into Rome itself. This was a place of a lot of comings and goings. But once a newer port sitting nearby started getting more traffic, Ostia Antica became so five minutes ago. It was so over. But its abandoned ruins are a really, really good place for archaeologists

to piece together the past, because that's what they do. I just stated the obvious. Anyway, Ostia Antica. And so then obviously Ostia becomes a very, very important place for the empire, and it becomes a very multicultural city. And it's a great, it's like a mini Rome. So the fact that it gets abandoned is just there, then allows us to have really exciting and pretty immediate excavations as opposed to other sites that are continually occupied like Rome. Obviously Rome was much more complex to excavate because there's a modern city on top of it. Yeah.

And what kind of stuff do you typically find? I'm thinking... You find a lot of pottery. I was going to say I feel like I've got a lot of bases. Yeah. So I mean imagine you have your house, you're living in your house for decades and decades and decades and you're producing over that time period a lot of garbage now imagine your rubbish heap your dump Was right outside in your backyard. Mm-hmm imagine what people would find

Personally, there's a bunch of kombucha bottles and empty bags at cool ranch Doritos. Let's be honest Oh, and of course we're obviously we're talking about a lot of today. We're talking about a lot of plastic. So for the Romans, almost everything, I mean sure there's leather goods they're using or baskets or what, you know, burlap bags or, but really what's traditionally preserved and what was used for storage from pretty much anything was pottery. So you're going to find that and that stuff is fired and it's basically indestructible. But you know, it's kind of like smashed, and those things can be pieced together. And then hopefully, if you're lucky, they write on them oftentimes what the material is

and so forth, or who owns it and so on. There's a big dump actually in Rome called Montetistaccio, it's like a hill. Oh my God, okay. And Google search reveals this huge grassy hill in an otherwise flat neighborhood. But then you get up close and it's like a ceramics graveyard.

There's just piles and piles and piles of broken pottery. Like if a giant just smashed all your jars. It's literally something like about 150 feet high. Oh my God. And it's got a circumference of like a mile and a half. And it just dumped ceramics that are smashed. And the primarily the amphe, these jars were used for carrying olive oil.

So then you say, well, why don't they just reuse the jars? Well, because if you have it filled with olive oil, you ever try to clean a bottle of olive oil? It's a pain. Okay, yeah, so what they did was they just smashed it. So it gives you an idea of the volume, the sheer volume that's coming in. And then keep in mind too that the,

we love the ancient guys because it was also sustainable. So even Rome was a big consumer city. Generally speaking, you'd take those jars and you'd smash them and you'd stick them in the rubble for the mortar of a wall. So these things get, you know, they're reusing everything. But to be able to create a massive hill like that means it has so much volume coming into this mega city that was the ultimate consumer city that, oh, we can't even use all this stuff. We'll just dump it over here. And it just becomes this hill.

Oh my God. So people have always been garbage people. Oh yeah. Some of the greatest finds I think in recent times really adding to our knowledge of the ancient world is like, for example, the drainage channels in Herculaneum, one of these cities destroyed by the eruption of Asuvius, they found something like six tons of human feces. So you go, ooh, that's not my kind of dig. But yeah, they go, oh, hit the mother load. Now, basically what happens is they sift through all this stuff and they find out, oh, they had parasites and they had, you know, and this is what they're eating.

This is their diet and so forth. And it's really, really fascinating. Since making this episode, side note, we've done scatology, all about zoo poo, and more recently environmental microbiology, which is all about testing wastewater for diseases. You're welcome. Enjoy your lunch. Somebody's got to do it. You don't know what's going to happen when you dig.

You will not know until you excavate. And that's part of the fun and the mystery. And in the puzzle work, because you never find everything intact, you're always going to find half the puzzle pieces are missing. So then you need to figure it out. And you figure that out by talking to colleagues and seeing things that are similar and so forth. But that's a lot of fun.

Now, when you've got, let's say, a crushed vase that you've understained, it's very exciting. Whose job is it to physically put it back together? Ah, yes. So then, I mean, that's the job of the conservator, which is very, very important. So, you know, you can carefully document and excavate. Like we actually had a number of tombs at our last dig.

So then we had a, you know, specific expert. So this expert he's talking about is the very, very European-sounding Pierpolo Petrone of the Laboratory of Human Osteobiology and Forensic Anthropology. This is near Pompeii. He's looking at some pelvic bone and he's telling you man or woman and age and da, da, da, da. So it's just, it was a lot of fun to have him on the site. And you have to depend upon a good team of people from different backgrounds. Depending on what you're doing, do you need a structural engineer because you're going

deep? Do you need this forensic anthropologist? Do you need the numismatist? Do you need for the coins? But it really is exciting because what you're doing is you're recovering the remains of ancient cultures. That's what really archeology is. And you're doing that through the examination

of the material remains. And it's not just the things, but it's the things that then indicate human activity, human lives. I mean, it really is the way to connect to those people of the past. And oftentimes, you know, it's not the big, high and mighty, the emperors, like I've done a lot of TV shows, and it's like, tell us one more episode, do one more episode on Caligula, you know, or somebody's from Nero, Burning Rome. But it's also just that average person, those communities, who are those people. And so they oftentimes remain anonymous because they don't have the funds to leave behind

something great and massive and impressive. So it's really the archeological remains that can help unearth their story. And how did ancient Romans live? Yeah, there's different ways of looking at it because on the one hand, we just, I mean, I'm still in awe of the aqueducts that were constructed to bring all that water into a city. I mean, how do you maintain a million people? I mean, that's a mega city.

Cities didn't get that large until after the 1700s. I mean, this is, you gotta get the Industrial Revolution to have the sophistication to have those cities. So the Romans had incredible, you know, different ways of, you know, benefiting from, yeah, conquest, but then also just a kind of a life standard that nobody else had. And so then people were, what are people doing today?

We're going to the cities because cities give you more opportunities. What were they doing under the Romans? People were flocking to the cities. There were jobs, there were opportunities, and there was a whole different lifestyle. You know, all these specializations, all these careers, like this is the person that makes the shoes. Sometimes, I mean, there was the guy down the street that was making your shoes.

Unless you get the import, right? Get more refined leather or whatever, and it can be much more expensive. But you know, the clothes that are being made, everything is made by hand, but in a certain sense, things did get industrialized. You could go to dry cleaners that could accommodate thousands and thousands of people.

You drop off your toga and your toga would be cleaned, oftentimes being soaked in ammonium from urine to get those stains out. No, thank you. Then afterwards, you'd rinse it out. Obviously, there are different ways in which you can have it clean and smelling well. The life got really complicated, but then also sophisticated because you had the water, let's say from the aqueducts coming in, you have the bath complexes, you can go,

you who don't even have a flushing, running water in your house or a toilet could go to these public spaces where you could have a jacuzzi. Okay, I looked up the amenities in Roman baths and they had heated floors and dry saunas and wet saunas and furnace warmed bathing water and coal plunges and these soaring beautiful ceilings and intricate mosaic floors and they were public so they were pretty cheap to get into and on some holidays they were just totally free and while

we're talking aquatic so the water systems in Rome were legendary they were channels of water that went under the city or above it in these bridge-like structures and they were fed by springs and the flow was transported only via gravity. So all these aqueducts were built to be on some gradient. And even if it wasn't too steep, it didn't even look steep, it still was enough to keep the water flowing just slightly downhill. Now the first aqueduct began operating in 312 BCE and it fed a cattle market in Rome. And then as the centuries passed, hundreds of these human-built rivers existed all over

the Roman Empire. And a lot of the water was used for the bathhouses. I mean, I'm mostly Italian and it's so weird to think of my ancestors just scrubby-dubby jacuzzi chilling. If you had to describe to like a second grader the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in like a couple of sentences, how did the Roman Empire get so powerful and what happened? Yeah, okay, that's that's that's a great one. So they started off as a little So powerful. Right. And what happened? Yeah. Okay. That's a great one.

So they started off as a little village like everybody else, but they had a sense of themselves and what they could accomplish, and they did it. So against all odds. So they ended up having a better military. Basically they had something, a good idea, a good kind of mindset that ends up over time allowing them not just to defeat people, but to have relationships with those people in those communities. And they do it rather quickly.

And they end up having a great network to the point that all these communities in Italy are now on their side. And they're all becoming Romans, right? They actually get the citizenship. Okay. Let's buckle up your butts for a whiz through space and time to get some highlights and a very, very brief history of the Roman Empire situation. So the history of Rome, it all starts around 753 BCE. Rome was ruled by a bunch of kings, a lot of whom.

A bunch of old menes. And then it became a republic in 509 BCE all the way to 45 BCE when it becomes an empire. So weird rulers start to take over starting with Julius Caesar who crosses the Rubicon into Italy and ends the era of this people led republic by becoming a dictator. So that empire lasts about 500 years until its fall, which happened about 476 AD. But Rome ends up, you know, still having this voice. I mean, Rome today still has a voice as well. It's the capital of a country. Countries only been around since 1870, 1860, thereabouts, as modern as modern Italy. There was no modern Italy before.

There was all city-states. So Italy's a brand new country. I did not know this. And again, I'm Italian. Can I ask you patron questions? Yeah. But before that, let's send off some money to a good cause. And this week we're going to toss some chunks of gold at the non-profit ancientroamlive.org, which is a free educational learning platform for students and teachers and travelers and history lovers. You can find out more at ancientroamlive.org. And Darius is the director. So score, boom, money. Thank you, sponsors. Okay, let's ask this nerd your questions. Jay wants to know, is Rome a big archaeological minefield with ancient stuff below the ground

everywhere? And how does anyone build anything without ruining some of the sweet mosaic under the ground? You're absolutely correct. Rome was the mega city, the greatest city of the ancient world, a million people living there. So everywhere you dig, you find something ancient. That's exactly correct.

Now, in different time periods, people cared less. So when you unify Italy, the Savoia family wants boulevards and new buildings and they uncover tons of stuff and then, oh look, we'll keep the statues or whatnot, we'll document this, but we'll knock everything down. So there are those issues where you lost a lot of material but also made a lot of discoveries. Today, of course, the process is very meticulous, very refined, and very time consuming. So I'm going to put an elevator in this building, or I want to gut this building and put in a department store, which happened with Rinna

Shente, then they literally found a whole slice of a neighborhood. Wow. Lloyd Parley has a bathroom question. All right. Spongena stick. Yep. Spongena stick. The whole wiping their butts with a public shared sponge on a stick. The whole wiping their butts with a public shared sponge on a stick. So a recent mosaic of this item, which is known as a xylospungium, was recently uncovered in modern Turkey. And let's just say it was humorous in nature. And it confirmed that for millennia, people have enjoyed toilet humor and comic strips

well in the john. They find a mosaic with a guy with a little stick and a sponge on it. So what's with that? So the idea is, do you have any idea how much paper cost back then? Oh my god, it was made by hand, it was made from papyrus. Oh god, I mean, you can't waste it. It's not going to happen. So you do, you know, what you, let's talk about, let's talk about diapers. I mean, seriously, all the modern things that we have today, then we're a throwaway society and it's convenient. I mean, go back.

I mean, my parents, they washed our diapers. But I mean, the things that we take for granted today. So it's the same thing with sponge on a stick. What do you expect them to do? These are big issues. So sponge on a stick. Thank you very much. Didn't know about that until this moment.

Oh, yes. Oh, God. Okay, let's see. Christopher Barley and Lord Barley both wanted to know if Roman concrete was indeed stronger than ours now. It is. It is. Yes, it is.

Okay, why is the dome of the Pantheon still standing after, let's say, you know, 1800 years? I mean, how is this possible? We can't build anything that lasts 1800 years, but I mean, how do you have anything last that long? How come we're excavating stuff when we're finding these really well-preserved structures is because they built them in a different way? And for us to do it today, it's not efficient. It's not cost-effect efficient.

So we cook the lime, the processing is different, so the materials weaker. Oh, I didn't know that. So that doesn't last as long. Okay. So much like a coveted recipe for barbecue sauce, Roman concrete recipes are exciting to people, including myself. Okay. So the secret ingredients, volcanic ash and seawater. So the seawater broke down the ash and then this other mineral, philipsite, crystallized in its place and that hardened the concrete over time. So instead of breaking down, it just kind of got better and better. But still, you know what? I would take our concrete over

there, xylospangia really any day. Okay, so this next question floored me. Jamie Peterson wants to know, is it true that marble statues were originally painted brilliant colors and the paint disappeared over the time to reveal the natural stone color that we see today? Yes, absolutely. Oh.

Because the materials were biodegradable. If you bury something, it's just gonna come off. They use tempera, they use encaustics, so they actually put a hot wax kind of paint that was translucent. So the whole dynamic on what it actually really looked like, we're not exactly sure. So when you see a reconstruction, always take those reconstructions a day at the grain of salt, because they're usually not very good. Okay. Okay. So to recreate what must have been there has not really been done.

When do they start painting them? Do you think? Ah, that's a good question. No, I mean, all throughout antiquity, they were painting them. That's so bananas. Now, you know, the full body, it could be like, it could be the clothing, the drapery, the hair, the paint, the pupils, maybe the ring on your finger, etc. Even inserting like a metal necklace or a crown or earrings. So it got to be quite dynamic and lavish, right? Last question I was asking. Okay.

That's the best thing about being an archaeologist. I think there's everything that's great. You meet people, diverse cultures, get to travel, gotta always have a little bit of a tan. My work is outdoors. My work is outside. Is it my younger daughter used to say when she was really little, she said, Daddy's office is the Coliseum, which is a nice thing to say. And it's kind of like, yeah, I mean, it's just, I want to be in contact with this as much as possible. And the other beautiful thing, again, to underline is there are collections around the world in museums, which do a phenomenal job to promote, you know, all this history and stuff like that.

But remember, they're all pretty much all collections. You've acquired, you've bought, you've purchased, and right now, they're really scrutinizing where this stuff is coming from because a lot of stuff is looted. Daria says that preservation is really important as is knowing where the objects came from. Seeing right now I'm at the Getty, and the Getty has a beautiful, fantastic relationship, wasn't always the case, but right now with the Italian government and their sharing and their working and their preserving monuments and so forth. So it's great to see when those things can really work. And it doesn't just benefit the monument themselves,

it benefits the local community, the local governments and so forth. That's the kind of things I'm involved in. I want to be more involved in. Thank you so much for doing this. This is great. Amazing. Yeah. I got to go to Rome. Just let me know when you're coming to Rome. I'll plan some stuff. We'll get it out for all spread.

Go check out some Roman ruins. Eat some pizza while you're there. You can find Darius Aria all over. He has tons of beautiful photos and links up at his website. That's DariusAriaDiggs.com and his Twitter and Instagram are also at DariusAriaDiggs. You can check out his show, Ancient Invisible Cities on PBS and his Italian show, Under Italy and that's at ryplay.it. R-I-a-p-l-a-y.it. And his American Institute for Roman Culture is at romanculture.org.

So you can find me at oligies on Twitter and Instagram at Ali Ward with 1L on both. And aliward.com has more links. Also linked is aliward.com slash smologies, which has dozens more kid safe and shorter episodes that you can blaze through. And thank you Mercedes-Maitland of Maitland Audio for editing those. And since we like to keep things small around here, the rest of the credits are in the show notes.

And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I give you a piece of advice. And this is some life advice I have sworn by for decades. And that is wear very brightly colored and patterned socks because not only do they make any outfit more exciting, you can wear them mismatched if you like. But when you're matching socks, it's just way easier if you got a bunch of weird wacky socks than if you got a bunch that are kind of the same color but bland. So start wearing weird socks because laundry day is way more fun that way.

All right, bye-bye. Smoleges. Smoleges. Smoleges. Smoleges. Smoleges. Smoleges. Smoleges. Smoleges. Smoleges.

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Smoleges.