Probably 3rd century BC. It was useless to have a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian’s Wall around. WH Auden imagines the potentially harsh conditions in his poem “Roman Wall Blues”, in which a soldier laments enduring the wet wind and rain with “lice in my tunic and cold in my nose”. According to a new paper published in the journal Parasitology, we can now add chronic nausea and diarrhea due to parasite infection to the list of potential troubles they may have.
As mentioned earlier, archaeologists can learn a lot by studying the remains of intestinal parasites in ancient feces. For example, in 2022, we reported on the analysis of soil samples collected from a stone latrine found within the ruins of a magnificent 7th-century BC villa just outside Jerusalem. That analysis revealed the presence of parasite eggs from four different species: whipworm, beef/pork tapeworm, roundworm, and pinworm. (This is the earliest 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 on an ancient Roman ceramic vessel excavated at the site of a 5th-century CE Roman villa in Gerase, a rural district in Sicily. They identified eggs of intestinal parasitic worms commonly found in feces – strong evidence that the 1,500-year-old vessel was likely used as a chamber pot.
Other prior studies have compared fecal parasites found in hunter-gatherer and farming communities, revealing dramatic dietary changes, as well as changes in settlement patterns and social organization with the rise of agriculture. This latest paper analyzes sediment collected from sewer drains at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, which lies just south of the defensive fort known as Hadrian’s Wall.
An archaeologist named William Camden recorded the existence of the ruins in a treatise dated 1586. Over the next 200 years, many 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 Vindoland. Serious archaeological excavations at the site began in the 1930s. The site is most famous for the so-called Vindolanda Tablet – one of the oldest surviving handwritten documents in the UK – and for the discovery in 2023 of an ancient Roman dildo, although others argued that the phallus-shaped artefact was more likely to be a drop spindle used for spinning cotton.
<a href