Parasites plagued Roman soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall

It probably sucked to be a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian’s Wall circa the third century CE. W.H. Auden imagined the likely harsh conditions in his poem “Roman Wall Blues,” in which a soldier laments enduring wet wind and rain with “lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.” We can now add chronic nausea and bouts of diarrhea to his list of likely woes, thanks to parasitic infections, according to a new paper published in the journal Parasitology. As previously reported, archaeologists can learn a great deal by studying the remains of intestinal parasites in ancient feces. For instance, in 2022, we reported on an analysis of soil samples collected from a stone toilet found within the ruins of a swanky 7th-century BCE villa just outside Jerusalem. That analysis revealed the presence of parasitic eggs from four different species: whipworm, beef/pork tapeworm, roundworm, and pinworm. (It’s the earliest record of roundworm and pinworm in ancient Israel.) Later that same year, researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of British Columbia analyzed the residue on an ancient Roman ceramic pot excavated at the site of a 5th-century CE Roman villa at Gerace, a rural district in Sicily. They identified the eggs of intestinal parasitic worms commonly found in feces—strong evidence that the 1,500-year-old pot in question was most likely used as a chamber pot. Other prior studies have compared fecal parasites found in hunter-gatherer and farming communities, revealing dramatic dietary changes, as well as shifts in settlement patterns and social organization coinciding with the rise of agriculture. This latest paper analyzes sediment collected from sewer drains at the Roman fort at Vindolanda, located just south of the defense fortification known as Hadrian’s Wall. An antiquarian named William Camden recorded the existence of the ruins in a 1586 treatise. Over the next 200 years, many people visited the site, discovering a military bathhouse in 1702 and an altar in 1715. Another altar found in 1914 confirmed that the fort had been called Vindolanda. Serious archaeological excavation at the site began in the 1930s. The site is most famous for the so-called Vindolanda tablets, among the oldest surviving handwritten documents in the UK—and for the 2023 discovery of what appeared to be an ancient Roman dildo, although others argued the phallus-shaped artifact was more likely to be a drop spindle used for spinning yarn.