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Fnord666 writes:

ArsTechnica has an interesting article about research being done into the waterworks of ancient Rome and how the amount of lead used seems to track with the rise and fall of Rome's fortunes.

The ancient Roman plumbing system was a legendary achievement in civil engineering, bringing fresh water to urbanites from hundreds of kilometers away. Wealthy Romans had hot and cold running water, as well as a sewage system that whisked waste away. Then, about 2200 years ago, the waterworks got an upgrade: the discovery of lead pipes (called fistulae in Latin) meant the entire system could be expanded dramatically. The city's infatuation with lead pipes led to the popular (and disputed) theory that Rome fell due to lead poisoning. Now, a new study reveals that the city's lead plumbing infrastructure was at its biggest and most complicated during the centuries leading up to the empire's peak.

Hugo Delile, an archaeologist with France's National Center for Scientific Research, worked with a team to analyze lead content in 12-meter soil cores taken from Rome's two harbors: the ancient Ostia (now 3km inland) and the artificially-created Portus. In a recent paper for Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the researchers explain how water gushing through Rome's pipes picked up lead particles. Runoff from Rome's plumbing system was dumped into the Tiber River, whose waters passed through both harbors. But the lead particles quickly sank in the less turbulent harbor waters, so Delile and his team hypothesized that depositional layers of lead in the soil cores would correlate to a more extensive network of lead pipes.

[...] Because it was so expensive, the city's plumbing system is a good proxy for Rome's fortunes. In their soil core from Ostia, Delile and his team even discovered evidence of the Roman Empire's horrific civil wars during the first century BCE. As war sucked gold from the state's coffers, there was no money to build new aqueducts nor to repair existing ones.

[...] Once the city had recovered from the hardships of the wars, the researchers saw a steady increase in lead over the years that span the Empire's height during the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.

[...] Delile and his colleagues saw the slow decline of Rome in the Ostia soil core, too. There was a strong drop in lead after the mid-3rd century CE, when the researchers note "no more aqueducts were built, and maintenance was on a smaller scale." They add that this phase of "receding [lead] contamination corresponds to the apparent decline of [lead] and [silver] mining and of overall economic activity in the Roman Empire."

PNAS, 2017. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1706334114

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