The Mountain of Broken Jars
A hill made of packaging
Walk south along the Tiber from the centre of Rome, past the old city slaughterhouse, and you come to a hill that has no business being there. It is about thirty-five metres high and close to a kilometre around. Grass grows on it, and a few trees. Dig a hand's depth into its slope, though, and you will not find soil. You will find pottery: curved orange shards as thick as roof tiles, packed together layer upon layer, all the way down.
Romans today call it Monte Testaccio, the mountain of potsherds. It is made almost entirely of broken olive oil jars, and archaeologists estimate that it holds the remains of around fifty million of them.
Each jar was a squat, round amphora made in southern Spain, in the valley of the Guadalquivir. Full, it held about seventy litres of oil. It went down the river to the coast, across the open sea to the mouth of the Tiber, upriver on a towed barge, and into the warehouses here at the edge of the city. There it was emptied. Then it was thrown away.
Not tossed on a heap, either. The jars could not be reused, because oil soaks into unglazed clay and turns rancid. So workers broke them into pieces of a convenient size, carried the shards up ramps, and laid them in terraces held back by walls built from more shards. Over each layer they spread lime, most likely to keep down the smell of old oil. For roughly two and a half centuries, somebody ran this tip as carefully as you would run a building site.
An engineer looks at a hill like that and starts doing sums. Fifty million jars over two hundred and fifty years comes to about two hundred thousand jars a year, every year, from one province, for one product. That is only the oil. It leaves out the wine, the fish sauce, the timber, the marble and the cargo that mattered more than all of them together, the one Rome could not do without for a single week: grain.
By the first century AD, Rome was home to something like a million people, and the countryside around it could not come close to feeding them. Every loaf in the city depended on ships, harbours, warehouses and roads working without a break, across a whole sea. This book is about how that machine was built, how it was kept running, and what happened on the days it nearly stopped.