Heard a grad student talking about a dig site near Pompeii that changed how I think about everyday life back then

I was waiting for my coffee last Tuesday and overheard this kid talking about finding a carbonized loaf of bread from 79 AD. It just hit me how ordinary stuff like bread can tell us more than all the fancy artifacts. Makes me wonder what future archaeologists would think if they dug up a petrified bagel from my shop. Anyone else find the small stuff way more interesting than the big monuments?

4 comments

4 Comments

terry67727d ago

Hold on a minute. A carbonized loaf of bread is interesting, sure, but let's not pretend it's some deep insight into the human condition. We already know people back then ate bread and it burned sometimes. It's a curiosity, not a revelation. I'd rather see a well-preserved tool they used every day, something that shows how they actually worked, not just what they ate for breakfast.

gavin69218d ago

Did you see that documentary about the old Roman tools @river320 was talking about? I read somewhere that they found a whole set of surgical tools from a doctor's house in Pompeii, which seems way more interesting than a burnt piece of bread.

river32027d ago

I feel you @terry677, sometimes the simple everyday stuff tells us way more than the flashy finds.

wendyk5618d ago

Yeah honestly I stumbled onto a documentary about Pompeii awhile back and the thing that got me was the graffiti. Like someone just scratched a joke about a bad baker on a wall. That's real life right there, same kind of dumb stuff people do now.