‘It all comes out in the wash’: Looking harder at the Romanfullonica

Abstract

In the Baths of Mithras at Ostia, a lead pipe from the public urinal carried fluids directly into a basement corridor which led to two small undergroundfullonicae(figs. 1-4). As must have happened in towns and cities all over the Roman world, this product of human excretion was flushed down the urinal to re-emerge as the quintessential industrial cleansing agent. The Roman fuller has achieved notoriety for his exploitation of urine for washing woollen cloth. In this paper, I intend first to attempt a definition of fulling, and to show that the process of identifying and reconstructing afullonicarequires us to think harder about Roman cleansing processes. I will argue that the topic of cleanliness is so culturally loaded that it is very difficult to reach a neutral account of fulling. Literary discourse on these processes and their agents offers us a set of contrasting responses, most notably in interpretations of urine. I will examine the ways in which the Romans played with some of these paradoxes in a world of limited chemistry. From this, I will suggest a topographical model of water and waste in which thefullonicawas a significant unit, and examine how the proverbial smells it generated raise interesting archaeological questions about location and urban space. A final section addresses the social profile of fullers and the cultural stereotypes attached to this profession.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 68 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.