[Sca-cooks] Metal Poisoning from the fork
Aruvqan
aruvqan at gmail.com
Sun May 11 15:15:21 PDT 2014
Sorry, lost the atribution but:
I believe that lead poisoning from the aqueducts is not probable,
aqueducts were wood, cement, stone and various forms of tile and mortar,
the lead piping from the bronze joints to the houses and fountains on
the other hand would be a consideration.
[structurally, the aqueducts were from the various rivers and springs
around cities at a higher elevations and were made up of building
materials, there was not enough lead in all of the empire to line all
the aqueducts with lead, some of them were 10 feet in diameter at the
source ends, and big enough that a smallish slave could crawl through
them at the city end, with settling chambers for sediment at various
points along the way. Fittings made of bronze were let in, so they could
not be messed with to allow more water than was paid for to flow. Lead
was only in the final distribution end of things and was fairly
expensive. It was a product of silver mining mainly, and a fair amount
actually came from the outskirts of the empire - Britain was a fairly
major source of lead. It was expensive enough that the few all lead
coffins discovered in the past few decades were seriously worthy of
comment by archeologists.]
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