Roman Toilets: Their Archaeology and Cultural History by Gemma C. M. Jansen, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, and Eric M. Moorman

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 427 architectural and artifactual landscape of Greek commerce affect search costs, networks of merchants and consumers, competition between merchants, and the risk-laden nature of transactions? University of Manitoba Mark L. Lawall Roman Toilets: Their Archaeology and Cultural History. Edited by Gemma C. M. Jansen, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, and Eric M. Moorman. Leuven: Peters (Papers on Mediterranean Archaeology Supplement 19). 2011. Pp. vii, 224, 169 illustrations. A number of years ago, I gave a paper several times in Canada entitled “Roman Sewage and Social Relations,” about ancient Roman mentalité and toilet habits. It was a topic which always garnered smirking and a few snickers from some audience members, and once, when I gave it at a CAC annual meeting, even (so I was told years later by friends) made it onto a national newspaper’s list of “Most Ridiculous Lecture Topics” given at academic conferences. But it is worth asking how Roman methods of waste disposal impinged on Roman social relations, and how these methods determined behavior (or vice versa). Social historians know that it is often the little things, the small and intimate records of human experience, that can often tell us most about a society. This book does just that. Roman Toilets covers toilets, toilet habits, and waste disposal in Roman Italy and in certain Roman provinces (Judaea, Syria, and Britain), and looks at a wide variety of toilet systems (public, private, military, rural, and urban). The book has an interesting format, with sections composed by thirty-three different authors, in English, French, German, and Italian—a truely international scholarly collaboration. The book is broadly divided into twelve chapters; each of these chapters has several contributions in a number of languages by a variety of authors, and comes with at least one architectural case study. Chapter One (“Introduction”) provides an overview of the field and discusses why scholarly interest in sanitation and toilets has been lacking. In Chapter Two (“Archaeometry : Methods and Analysis”) the range of data available and the methods used to investigate these materials are discussed. Outlined here are many questions for the researcher : how to recognize an ancient toilet; where toilets were located; how to determine use and maintenance; recognizing other deposits within the toilets (such as glass shards, bone fragments, ash); and the abandonment of toilet facilities. Parasitologial and microfaunal studies are invaluable in latrine work: in the remains of ancient feces other ingested materials survive, such as bran fragments, fruit skin, fragments of fish, and intestinal parasites, giving us information about diet and disease in antiquity . In Chapter Three (“Non-Roman Forerunners”) latrines and toilet behavior in early Jerusalem, Egypt, and Greece are surveyed, while in Chapter Four (“Roman Sources”) there is a valuable compilation of all the literary sources on Roman latrines (43–47), as well as a discussion of Jewish and Christian attitudes to nakedness. In Chapter Five (“Design, Architecture, and Decoration of Toilets”) there is an overview of the design 428 PHOENIX and decoration of toilets, of both latrina, a public toilet, and forica, a public multiseater . Mosaics and décor in latrines do not differ significantly from those found in other domestic contexts; furniture recovered from toilets includes marble seats and armrests . Public toilets across the Roman empire could be quite extravagantly set up: one latrine near the Western baths in Kos had a room for an attendant and had lavish décor (64). Chapter Six (“Toilets in the Urban and Domestic Water Infrastructure”) offers an interesting examination of water sources for cleaning and flushing latrines. In early times Romans probably used waste water from the kitchen to flush the latrine, but in the imperial era toilets were sometimes connected to the water mains. In Pompeii and Herculaneum almost no house toilets were connected to a source of running water (72), while in Ostia, by contrast, many more were attached to the mains (72). Sponge gutters are also normally found in toilets, and perhaps overflow water was used to flush this gutter (75). Even upper-stories and insulae had toilets: there is evidence that “drop toilets” were built over downpipes in the walls, and flowed into a sewer or a cesspit. Chapter Seven (“Urination...

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