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What Ancient Rome Can Teach Us About Industrial Pollution
Lead exposure significantly lowered the empire’s IQ
There’s something magical about the ice sheet in the arctic. Yes, it has a stark and majestic beauty, but more than that is the knowledge it contains. Because the ice sheet in the arctic is deposited year after year and doesn’t entirely melt, it grows, forming layer after layer like tree rings, giving us a window into the atmosphere of the past. Arctic ice cores give us information, for example, about CO2 levels in the atmosphere over millennia of time.
But if you were a researcher interested in, say, atmospheric lead levels, you’d find ice cores rather disappointing. At least for much of prehistory.
Something changed rather dramatically, though, in those ice cores around 500 BCE. Lead levels started to rise. Quickly.
And if you know a bit of history, I suspect you know why.
This week, we are looking at atmospheric lead levels in the context of the Roman Empire. It’s a story relying on data from this article by Joseph McConnell and colleagues, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and it’s a story with contours that are eerily similar to the challenges we face today: the balance of industry and public health and the strange interplay that a pandemic has on both.
It would be easy to think about lead as yet another (or perhaps the first) industrial pollutant — a byproduct of industry. But there is something a bit unique about Roman lead exposure compared to the exposure of a modern populace to industrial pollutants. Lead was useful. A malleable metal that was fairly corrosion resistant, it found its way into many areas of Roman life. And often, in contrast to modern pollutants, into the lives of the well-to-do. In Rome, exposure might have been higher among the elites. Romans consumed lead through myriad mechanisms — lead acetate was used to sweeten wine —…
