A new paper delving into the sanitary implications of the innovative toilets and plumbing system of ancient Rome has suggested that the technology might have made things worse and not better.
According to the Atlantic, ancient Romans were considered to be far ahead of their time in terms of toilet technology. Not only were public toilets constructed and utilized, but bathhouses and fully featured sewer system as well.
“They [also] introduced legislation so that towns had to clear away the waste from the roads and things and take all that waste mess outside towns,” says Piers Mitchell, a paleopathologist at the University of Cambridge. “You’d expect those things to improve the health of the people that lived there as a result.”
The study in question, which was posted in the journal Parasitology, sees Mitchell examining the presence of fossilized lice, fleas, and bed bugs in ancient Roman bathhouses.
These parasites are studied in order to determine the effectiveness of the sanitation technology. A culture that is more sanitary should have less parasites, right?
What Mitchell found was, although the Roman toilets as well as their plumbing technology were indeed innovative and ingenious, the sanitary conditions of the city were not as ideal as they might have once been thought.
Researchers found the fossils of various ectoparasites — parasites which live outside of the body like lice, fleas and bed begs — suggesting low levels of sanitation more on par with that of the Vikings or medieval times.
The study comes as a surprise, as the Romans have often been lauded for their improvements in sanitation technology.
“While the arrival of public latrines in Roman Italy probably did improve the sanitary conditions of cities to some extent, we must not automatically assume that sanitary improvement was the one, the only, or the main Roman motive behind the construction of toilets,” says Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, a professor of classical studies at Brandeis University.
“You can’t automatically assume that they would have made these sanitation technologies … to make people healthier,” says Mitchell.