The Graeco-Roman economy in the super long-run: lead, copper, and shipwrecks

Lead pollution recorded in Greenland ice indicates European emissions tracked plagues, wars, and imperial expansion during antiquity

“…1) first alerted historians to changes in world metal production during the last three millennia (1)(2)(3). These measurements, together with other proxy indicators, have been used in revisionist studies of the Roman economy (4)(5)(6), including suggestions that lead production during the Roman period was not exceeded until the late Middle Ages and that Republican Roman production was greater than that of Imperial Rome, indicating no economic growth during the imperial period. These findings, however, were based on only 18 discrete ice-core samples between 1100 BCE and 800 CE, each representing a 2-y average.…”

Agents and commodities: a response to Brughmans and Poblome (2016) on modelling the Roman economy

“…In the field of the Roman economy, ‘big data’ has tended to be translated as ‘quantification’ (Bowman & Wilson 2009; Poblome et al 2012). Quantified lists, graphs and tables of pots, shipwrecks or lead isotopes (de Callataÿ 2005) come closest to the historical price lists that are the prime datasets of economic historians who work on later periods (Scheidel 2009; Temin 2013). But regardless of the type of data, things—the goods that are made, traded, sold and bought—are modelled as commodities.…”

The role of underwater cultural heritage on dark matter searches: Ancient lead, a dual perspective

“…As an example, the EDELWEISS-II dark matter detector at the Laboratoire Souterraine du Modane, uses lead at the 120 mBq/kg range and even at this level 210 Pb contributes to 33% of the background noise at the low energy end (Schmidt et al, 2013) (see Table 2). Ancient lead: Roman yearly production of lead has been estimated at 80.000 tonnes a year (Callataÿ, 2005) providing an important source of non-renewable low-alpha lead. In that sense, 2000-year old Roman lead recovered from the Mediterranean Sea has been studied in detail (Alessandrello et al, 1998) which has demonstrated extremely low levels of intrinsic radioactive emissions.…”