Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved | Hacker News Reader

Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

theguardian.com

85 pointssecondary32 comments

There’s also a bottle just like this (well, extremely similar Roman fish bottle) in the archaeological museum of Burgas, on the Bulgarian coast - I spent about 15 minutes looking at it having my mind blown by the craftsmanship - which would corroborate the Black Sea hypothesis. They however listed it as being a garum bottle, IIRC.

I’m not surprised they ended up finding the only known example across the Atlantic - Bulgaria has great, completely empty, museums - this was one of many where the surprised attendant unlocked the place so we could go in.

Garum is fish sauce, I think?

Yeah - basically the ketchup of the day. Worcestershire sauce is apparently the closest extant thing, as it’s made in pretty much the same way - fermented anchovies.

Curious, why Worcestershire sauce and not any of the fishsouces you can buy in a chinese/Thai/Vietnamese grocery?

GP probably meant "closest" in terms of lineage, not just composition. There's more of a Western connection to Worcestershire.

In fact the Vietnamese fish sauces (which are made without adding any sugar or soy, and only made with anchovies and salt) are exactly like the garum and liquamen of ancient Rome.

I think the closest thing is probably fish sauce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum#Legacy

Example: Tiparos (on the left) https://importfood.com/products/thai-sauces-condiments/item/...

Happens I can recommend tiparos as it's not brutally salty like others I've met. My guess is that this modern kind of fish sauce is useful (and I've heard it highly spoken of by a semi-professional chef) because it's high in glutamates which taste meaty (umami) but that's just a guess.

You can buy garum today, from manufacturers that claim to follow recipes hundreds of years old. The process is claimed to be unknown, but this is in fact not true: A couple of descriptions exist of the process, for example how it was made in Caesarea, in Judea, which also manufactured murex purple dye.

For me it is a mystery how a product made all around the Mediterranean in antiquity died out almost completely. Why didn't people in southern France, for example, keep eating garum until the modern day? Was it just changing tastes, sudden loss of necessary ingredients due to breakdown in trade, or recognition that parasites inside fish could survive the garum-making process?

It's a great question! One thing I might suggest is human migration displacing garum, or displacing the people that had a taste for it. Between "Antiquity" and today, you're as likely to find an immigrant population as a native one. I've been reading a lot about Roman history, and trying to answer questions like this, and many signs point to migration. The various -goths and Vandals in particular carved the Iberian peninsula (and southern France) out of the increasingly fragmented (Western) Roman Empire. According to the original sources, most of the garum in the Empire was produced in both provinces of Hispania. Considering the, uhh... "dynamism" of that place in the ensuing centuries, it sounds believable to me that garum simply fell out of favor culturally. Trade collapsed after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. So garum shipments from the Empire's largest garum-producing region simply stopped.

It is true however that there are still Italian and Greek garum producers, as I mentioned, who claim to have been producing since Antiquity. Though this is 100% unverifiable, there's little reason to think it's not true. The thing about garum production is that IT IS SMELLY! Very, very smelly. Roman law actually forbade garum production within a certain distance to the city walls. And as the Western Empire began to evaporate, the production of most specialty / delicacy items (think wine, garum, honey, cheese, etc) moved to "wealthy manor homes" which -- because of the danger of the roads -- slowly became the armed fortress fiefdoms of feudal Europe. So probably it just fell out of favor as time wore on, except in a small few exceptional places.

What does it taste like?

Umame, in a nutshell. Hard to really quantify, but I recommend trying it!

The Natural History Museum in Sofia was pretty much empty this May! My partner and I had the whole place to ourselves. There's an absolutely incredible array of gems and stones, plenty of taxidermy--and I presume models--of all sorts of fauna, and lots of random bits and bobs dotted all around. Bulgaria is a wonderful place!

"across the Atlantic"

The UK is on your side of the Atlantic, unless you go the long way round of course.

Edit: I get it, they matched it to the New York example.

They probably would want to know about that.

I very much doubt they want some bloody amateur wading in. They have their processes, and I’m sure they’ll make their own discoveries in their own time.

Would the distance in question be close to the distance from Glevum to Chersonesos? Then the fastest route between them would take 60 days.

This "google map" of the roman world by Stanford is fantastic!

http://orbis.stanford.edu/

If only such analysis was available realtime for all current economic variables.

Apparently Firefox is not "modern" according to orbis. Very unfortunate how the web has become such a monoculture.

> Price eventually found it matched a restored fish-shaped bottle in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass in New York.

This is a really interesting place, I definitely recommend visiting it.

I enjoy their YouTube channel from time to time where they have glassmaking demonstrations and more. Interesting stuff, imho.

It would have been cool to include that image, rather than:

> The trust commissioned the archaeological illustrator Maggie Foottit to produce an impression of how the complete fish bottle may have looked.

Doesn't seem very mysterious to me. If you're gonna find something from far away you're gonna find it in some place the kind of people who would travel from far away (i.e. high class people, this is antiquity we're talking about, Greyhound buses hadn't been invented yes) would be. The site they found it at is one of the most impressive villas in England, exactly the kind of place where you'd host some guest from far away.

I agree, it's not like people couldn't travel around, and it would be beneficial for traders to do so

Yep and we have a couple of surviving books from those days regarding traveling.

I would be surprised if a wealthy person had gone all the way to the black sea and back.

If you think of trade as sort of just randomly shuffling objects between nodes on a graph, given enough objects and enough time, you should see some examples of everything from everywhere, without any single person taking any object all the way from a to z.

I buy some perfume bottles at a port on the black sea, sell a bunch of them in anatolia, some trader picks them up a crate of them from a market in constantinople, sells them at a markup in italy, an aristocrat gives one to his wife, and then then gets appointed governor in Gaul, etc..

Yeah trading, looting, however it moves if it is of some value I expect it would move around eventually just by changing hands.

How direct or complex trade networks may be can be up for debate, but humans will be handing things off one way or another for sure.

While I agree with your entropy model I think that for items like this there's more direct paths that are equally reasonable.

It stands to reason that the middle level important people who made strategic level decisions about things like military defenses, which roads to build up, etc, etc who's work was on the edge of the empire would move between the various points on its edge directly rather than traveling to/from Rome like a higher level person who reports to people in Rome would do. Some middle level political or military official probably bought the perfume around the same time they moved from the northeast to the northwest or had reason to travel there and brought it back as a souvenir or gift for their wife or something.

Sure, most rich people didn't travel or not that far but of those that did this is exactly the kind of place they'd wind up going to/from or passing through. The glass could have gotten there through a circuitous route as you described but I find it slightly more probable that it could have been transported there reasonably directly by its end user.

There's basically zero chance that glass bottle belonged to anyone that wasn't super wealthy. Also, "middle level" "decision makers" were essentially all assigned to a specific legion, or e.g. veterans with land grants taking an administrative office. Id est mostly static individuals. Almost all travel within the Roman Empire was either military or trade. Or super wealthy people (and/or their entourage).

The archaeologists working on the dig thought it was a bit of a mystery and a special find. Not so much the fact that there was an unusual artifact, but where the unusual artifact may have come from.

The glass historian they contacted also thought it was a bit of a mystery and a special find.

What are your qualifications to say that they were wrong?

What's mysterious is what it was. Now that we know that it seems like there's several non-controversial paths for how it could have got where we found it.

I imagine it was used to carry the captured souls of pedantic people.

Pedants.

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