Roman Shit.

I think I've mentioned several times that I'm not a very good Museum Classicist, because I find pots and the like extremely dull. This sort of thing, however, I think is pretty much the coolest thing ever:

This particular cess-pit serves a three-storey apartment block in Herculaneum and it is now famous because underneath the settled volcanic deposit Andrew's team discovered loads and loads of the Roman shit remaining -- almost 800 large bags of it to be precise. And in this shit (which I can testify is well and truly composted, as I shoved my hand into one of the bags and found it the constituency of rather fine soil) was found precious traces of what had passed through the digestive tracts of the people living in the block. Not to mention all the other things that they chose to throw down their loos -- which seem to have functioned as waste disposal units/dustbins. A lot of the sieved organic remains are now being studied in Oxford, and they certainly show that the residents were consuming eggs, nuts, figs and sea-urchins.

I hadn't expected to be able to see the chutes coming down from the top storey of the apartment block, nor the smears of calcified Roman shit still clinging to the walls down which it had fallen. Nor had I expected the whole thing to be quite so well built.

Oh yes, we can say, the Romans in the Bay of Naples ate sea-urchins and built very good sewers. BEAT THAT.