
Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved - secondary
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/22/mystery-of-chedworth-1800-year-old-roman-glass-shard-solved
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madaxe_again
There’s also a bottle just like this (well, extremely similar Roman fish
bottle) in the archaeological museum of Burgas, on the Bulgarian coast - I
spent about 15 minutes looking at it having my mind blown by the craftsmanship
- which would corroborate the Black Sea hypothesis. They however listed it as
being a garum bottle, IIRC.

I’m not surprised they ended up finding the only known example across the
Atlantic - Bulgaria has great, completely empty, museums - this was one of
many where the surprised attendant unlocked the place so we could go in.

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leashless
Garum is fish sauce, I think?

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madaxe_again
Yeah - basically the ketchup of the day. Worcestershire sauce is apparently
the closest extant thing, as it’s made in pretty much the same way - fermented
anchovies.

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sorokod
Curious, why Worcestershire sauce and not any of the fishsouces you can buy in
a chinese/Thai/Vietnamese grocery?

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fapjacks
In fact the Vietnamese fish sauces (which are made without adding any sugar or
soy, and only made with anchovies and salt) are exactly like the garum and
liquamen of ancient Rome.

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fsloth
Would the distance in question be close to the distance from Glevum to
Chersonesos? Then the fastest route between them would take 60 days.

This "google map" of the roman world by Stanford is fantastic!

[http://orbis.stanford.edu/](http://orbis.stanford.edu/)

If only such analysis was available realtime for all current economic
variables.

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jdsully
Apparently Firefox is not "modern" according to orbis. Very unfortunate how
the web has become such a monoculture.

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mcphage
> Price eventually found it matched a restored fish-shaped bottle in the
> collection of the Corning Museum of Glass in New York.

This is a really interesting place, I definitely recommend visiting it.

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mirimir
It would have been cool to include that image, rather than:

> The trust commissioned the archaeological illustrator Maggie Foottit to
> produce an impression of how the complete fish bottle may have looked.

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dsfyu404ed
Doesn't seem very mysterious to me. If you're gonna find something from far
away you're gonna find it in some place the kind of people who would travel
from far away (i.e. high class people, this is antiquity we're talking about,
Greyhound buses hadn't been invented yes) would be. The site they found it at
is one of the most impressive villas in England, exactly the kind of place
where you'd host some guest from far away.

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empath75
I would be surprised if a wealthy person had gone all the way to the black sea
and back.

If you think of trade as sort of just randomly shuffling objects between nodes
on a graph, given enough objects and enough time, you should see some examples
of everything from everywhere, without any single person taking any object all
the way from a to z.

I buy some perfume bottles at a port on the black sea, sell a bunch of them in
anatolia, some trader picks them up a crate of them from a market in
constantinople, sells them at a markup in italy, an aristocrat gives one to
his wife, and then then gets appointed governor in Gaul, etc..

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dsfyu404ed
While I agree with your entropy model I think that for items like this there's
more direct paths that are equally reasonable.

It stands to reason that the middle level important people who made strategic
level decisions about things like military defenses, which roads to build up,
etc, etc who's work was on the edge of the empire would move between the
various points on its edge directly rather than traveling to/from Rome like a
higher level person who reports to people in Rome would do. Some middle level
political or military official probably bought the perfume around the same
time they moved from the northeast to the northwest or had reason to travel
there and brought it back as a souvenir or gift for their wife or something.

Sure, most rich people didn't travel or not that far but of those that did
this is exactly the kind of place they'd wind up going to/from or passing
through. The glass could have gotten there through a circuitous route as you
described but I find it slightly more probable that it could have been
transported there reasonably directly by its end user.

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fapjacks
There's basically zero chance that glass bottle belonged to anyone that wasn't
super wealthy. Also, "middle level" "decision makers" were essentially all
assigned to a specific legion, or e.g. veterans with land grants taking an
administrative office. Id est mostly static individuals. Almost all travel
within the Roman Empire was either military or trade. Or super wealthy people
(and/or their entourage).

