The Roman Road Project - The Ruts That Ruined It

On Friday, February 17, my students worked alongside DOTD to complete the concrete layer on our Roman Road Project. It was an arduous, day-long process that exhausted all of us, but we were so thrilled to be done with the construction phase of our little road/sidewalk.

 

We diligently placed signs and netting on the entry points. Our principal made an announcement to all our students to not walk on the wet concrete, and we had no issues getting everyone off campus for our three-day Mardi Gras break without damage to the road. I left campus that day feeling the glow of accomplishment. We had almost completed a service project that the kids had dreamed up nearly three years ago.

Just in case, we left orange netting and signs on all areas of the concrete.

Unfortunately, we didn't account for what might happen on an open campus during the Friday night neighborhood Mardi Gras parade. I returned after Mardi Gras break to this scene. Someone had ridden a bike down the whole length of the road leaving a high ridge on either side of the rut and effectively ruining our work. Many deep sighs were breathed. My students and I were devastated. We gave ourselves a whole day to be mad and grieve our lost work before we started brainstorming how to fix it.

We started by recalling how many ruts ancient Roman roads had. And then I reminded them of one of the most interesting articles I've read about Roman roads: "The Iron Streets of Pompeii" by Poehler, Van Roggen, and Crowther, which explored the Romans' use of molten metal to fill in cracks and strengthen damaged streets. (You can read a condensed version of the article here.) After many discussions about what to do, a few options emerged.

Option 1: Use Quikrete to fill in the ruts and then a sanding tool to flatten out the ridges. Not super Roman, but probably effective.

Option 2: Although I'm not going near molten metal of any kind with 12-year-old students assisting, I really love the idea of filling it in with epoxy resin. Maybe we could stain it the color of iron or put some glitter in it (alright, I might be watching too much TikTok). The contrast between the gray of the concrete and the shiny glitter would be striking.

Option 3: Leave it alone as a testament to vandals everywhere. The Romans dealt with vandalism all the time in their public spaces. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that we didn't end up with some other kind of symbol on our road:

(Yep, the Romans sometimes used phallic symbols like this one carved into their roads to advertise their brothels...so not really vandalism, but...pretty funny nonetheless.)

What do YOU think we should do?

The Roman Road Project - The Mud That Was out for Blood

Does this man's marching boot from the Roman fort at Vindolanda in northern England look like it could sustain use in wet, muddy areas? I'm skeptical. And I've been thinking about this issue a lot lately due to the weather in Louisiana.

I often wonder how much easier it would have been to build our little road back in October when it didn't rain for almost 6 weeks. I wonder about that a lot because right around the time we started building in mid-January, it rained nearly every day. Like clockwork, it rained, and rained, and then rained some more. It was nice to work in cooler weather, but the rain caused a massive amount of mud. So. Much. Mud. To add insult to injury, the area our road passes through is basically a swamp. After all, that's the reason we're building the road - to give our students and teachers another route through the school that wasn't possible before.

Here's one of the large puddles:

It got so bad sometimes, that we actually got stuck in it. "That mud is out for blood" was our joke. My little 6th graders often complained about getting stuck, and I didn't really believe them until I myself got my boot almost pulled off my foot by the mud. Luckily, a nearby 8th-grade boy pulled me out. We all wore rubber boots to keep our feet clean (thanks to a grant, I was able to purchase shared boots), but our pants nearly always ended up with splatters. There was very little chance of not getting dirty on this project.

At the end of each class, I apologized profusely to our custodian, Mr. Shawn, who had to sweep up all the dirt and mud we dragged into the building after each building session. My classroom had all the makings of a disaster. Muddy boots came in, and then dried out and flaked off large chunks of dirt which the evening custodian, Mrs. Geraldine, swept up. When I told my students about how bad I felt about dirtying up the floors that others had to clean up, they suggested buying special gift cards for our custodians. What a magnificent idea! This project has forced my students and I to think through so many details.

If we're having trouble dealing with mud with modern rubber boots to help us, what did the Romans do? Archaeologists have found many leather boots and shoes at the Roman fort at Vindolanda along Hadrian's Wall in England. None of them look even remotely similar to boots that we wear to trudge through the mud. And there MUST have been mud in ancient Britain. Even if Roman soldiers had boots high enough to protect them from mud puddles, how would the leather have performed in such wet conditions? And where would they clean off the leather boots they wore for these projects? The whole prospect of it gives me fits to consider. It must have been a big old mess.

And that leads me to think about our next big project in Roman Technology class. Shoes - studying them, exploring leather tools used to make them, designing them, and actually building our own Roman sandals. I hope to visit Vindolanda's shoe collection this summer to get inspiration. Sometimes, the technology we study may seem mundane, but imagine living your life without shoes as an ancient Roman soldier. Impossible without Roman technology!

Here's my own shoe in the mud:

The Roman Road Project - The Answer Is Blowing in the Wind

As much as I enjoy carrying large rocks far distances through the mud (that's a joke), building the actual road was not nearly the most interesting part of the Roman Road Project. By far, the most exciting thing was learning to use a GROMA, the ancient Roman surveying tool. Dr. Courtney Roby had explained how to use one as she does in her Roman technology class at Cornell University (I talked about how integral my conversation with her was in another post). I remember her telling me that one of the issues she had was steadying the swinging lines used to sight the rods in a straight line. I had read that the Romans used little pots of oil to steady the sway of the plum bobs attached to the ends of the lines. Despite the fact that neither Tyson, my DOTD expert, nor I thought this method would work, we decided to give it a try.

It was a sunny, clear day when we set out on our first day of surveying. Tyson had brought some old transits to show the students how things were done in the olden days. He also talked about new laser transits in use today. Looking through the scope on the transit, the students were amazed at how far they could see with such great detail.

 

We used the groma to mark the outlines of the road from one point to another. We didn't have to do the more complicated procedure of setting up right angles for the corners of towns, forts, or buildings as the Romans did. In the picture below, 6th-grade Roman technologist Warren is sighting the green lines of the groma with the rod that Tyson is holding in the distance.

So, here's what was going on near the ground to make these lines work. 8th grader Skylar is performing this same procedure from the other direction. You can see the oil pots set up below the groma.

We tried using the groma without the oil first, and we quickly discovered that it was nearly impossible to get the lines to quit swinging even with little to no wind blowing. This realization prompted our decision to try the oil.

We set up small bowls of oil on top of blocks of wood that I normally use for stone cutting. We stacked as many as needed to get just the right height for the plumbs to hang into the oil ever so slightly. Sometimes this required stacking smaller pieces of wood we were using as our rods to align the road. I imagine the Romans needing a set of wood pieces to carry around with their groma setup for this very purpose.

After all these machinations, Tyson and I laughing at the absurdity of this method, we finally got the plumbs hanging in the oil, and...something amazing happened. The lines stopped swinging immediately, the motion of the plumb bobs being stopped by the density of the oil. Tyson and I were stunned. I'm sure the Romans would have used olive oil. I had brought some cooking oil because I hate to waste good-quality olive oil. I wasn't expecting this experiment to work at all. I was so sorry I didn't have olive oil to try out and compare. Just for fun, we also tried water which did not work. The students jumped to explain the difference between oil and water - they are so smart!

To me, this day was the best on the project. We used actual experimental archaeology to figure something out. 

The Roman Road Project - The Famous Nerd Author Visit

I don't really remember when science/history writer Sam Kean reached out to me, but it was at least a year ago. I got an email from him randomly. Since I was familiar with his books, I kinda thought it might be a joke. But, for real, the New York Times best-selling author of The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements and Caesar's Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us was really contacting me. Terri Gross interviewed him for Fresh Air (you can listen here.)

Sam writes my favorite type of book, non-fiction stories about technical science, but because they are stories, you want to read them; in fact, you can't put them down. You can tell he was a journalist at some point in his career. Authors like Jon Krakauer, Erik Larson, Daniel James Brown fall into this category too, and I love them! Sam also has his own podcast (also called "The Disappearing Spoon") about nerdy science stuff, exactly the kind of thing I like to listen to on my daily walks. By the time of his visit, he had been writing for a podcast called "Against the Odds," one of my favorites. The series he wrote was about a New Orleans Navy captain named Oliver Naquin whose submarine sank on a training mission in 1939 and was rescued by a diving bell, the first of its kind.

According to his first email to me, Sam was writing a book about experimental archaeology. He had found my name and Website because I'm a member of ExArc, an international organization and community dedicated to sharing work about archaeological open-air museums, research on material culture, and all things related to the field. Sam and I chatted on the phone for a long time about all the projects I incorporate into my Roman Technology curriculum, and he asked if he might visit my class at some point. We played email tag for a long time after that until he could finally nail down a time to visit. He wanted to see our Roman road project in action.

During his visit in February, Sam tried out writing with squid ink on papyrus. I also showed him how to make ink from oak galls. In this picture, he's writing "Fourscore and seven years ago..." (the first line of the Gettysburg Address). I wondered if he wrote that phrase a lot for testing out pens and other writing tools. Every time I test out ancient writing tools, I always use "Arma virumque cano..." (the first line of the Aeneid), or "Odi et amo" (from Catullus 85). Everyone has their line, I guess.

During his three-day visit, Sam was a trooper. He never complained about the mud at our build site, or my loud but charming students, or the absolute chaos of my classroom, every wall of which was lined with muddy rubber boots. And despite being stuck in my classroom for over an hour in a school-wide lockdown (a kid was having a medical emergency and needed to be loaded onto an ambulance none of which we knew at the time of the actual experience), he never panicked and even agreed to talk to my students about his craft during the lockdown. The kids thoroughly enjoyed asking him questions about his books and travels. He told them about his visit with Janet Stephens, the "hair archaeologist" who reproduces ancient Roman hairstyles using authentic tools and methods. When they asked him whether he would be writing about our Roman road, and he responded with an enthusiastic yes, you could hear the hushed excitement. 

It was so gratifying to have a writer I admire for his nerdiness (and I mean that as a total compliment) want to talk to ME about MY nerdy work. And I fully expect him to feature his visit to my Roman Technology classroom in another episode of "Against the Odds: School Lockdown."

The Roman Road Project - What will we name it?

I began our unit on Roman roads with an overview of the famous roads of ancient Italy. When my students found out that all the roads had names, they immediately seized on the idea of naming our own little road. "Can we name OUR road? What are we gonna call it?"

Some suggestions:

1. Via Caledonia: Caledonia is the ancient Roman name for Scotland. Since our school is Glasgow Middle named after the street it's on, this name would make sense!

2. Via Principalis: The lower east/west road in a Roman military camp or fort was called the principalis because it led to the principia or headquarters of the camp. Not only does our road run east/west, but it also leads to our school's office, the headquarters of sorts.

3. Something else??

Want to help us name it? Check out this survey to vote or offer your own suggestion.

Meanwhile, we finished installing the sand so kids are already trying to walk on the jagged surface of our little road. We are excited to finish!

The Roman Road Project - The Hard Work We All Need

I recently attended an excellent online lecture about the work of ancient Roman potters. The Archaeological Institute of America hosted Dr. Elizabeth Murphy as she spoke about the lives of these workers. She started with a quote from Herbert Appelbaum's book The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, "Work is the spine that structures the way people live, how they make contact with material and social reality, and how they achieve status and self-esteem. As anthropologists, we are interested in work because of what it tells us about the rest of society, based on the viewpoint that basic institutions touch all institutions." And it got me thinking about our project.

In the short time that we've been building our road little road, the work of building has changed our lives in small ways. We're all getting more exercise and enjoying the outdoors immensely even when it's chilly. In a recent informal survey about the Roman road project, every single student (nearly 80) said they were having fun building the road even though it was hard and the stones were heavy. They got to "hang out with friends" as they worked. I've noticed friendships forming that had not been there before. These new friends carry their buckets together as they walk back and forth from the rock pile, chatting as they go. They help each other with the unwieldy wheelbarrow.

Did the Roman soldiers have the same feelings we are now when they worked on a project? Many students also mentioned that they were proud to be building something that would be used by their classmates and help the school with a problem. Did the Romans feel that pride? I think they must have even though they went to bed tired and sore every night.

Appelbaum's quote highlights an aspect of experimental archaeology that resonates with me. The voices of the marginalized of Roman history are rarely heard in literature. Reproducing their work environments using tools and methods they did can help to bring those voices to life. I wrote a piece about this a few months ago for Edutopia. (You can read it here.)

My students have been through a LOT in the past three years with Covid shutdowns, online and hybrid classes, disjointed friendships, and the stress of getting back into the routines of in-person school. This project has been the perfect opportunity for us to come together for a common goal. Students from our last Roman Technology class, the ones who missed out on a big collaborative project due to online learning, regularly stop by the help us. The work keeps us busy, no time to argue, look at our phones, or worry about much of anything. Bucket after bucket. Stone after stone. Our road will soon be done, but its impact will be forever.