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Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

theguardian.com

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Re: Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

#21

Post by lawlessone »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #20
compiler-guy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The archaeologists working on the dig thought it was a bit of a mystery and a special find. Not so much the fact that there was an unusual artifact, but where the unusual artifact may have come from. The glass historian they contacted also thought it was a bit of a mystery and a special find. What are your qualifications to say that they were wrong?

What's mysterious is what it was. Now that we know that it seems like there's several non-controversial paths for how it could have got where we found it.

I imagine it was used to carry the captured souls of pedantic people.

Re: Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

#22

Post by tempguy9999 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #13
leashless wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Garum is fish sauce, I think?

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.

I think the closest thing is probably fish sauce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum#Legacy

Example: Tiparos (on the left) https://importfood.com/products/thai-sauces-condiments/item/...

Happens I can recommend tiparos as it's not brutally salty like others I've met. My guess is that this modern kind of fish sauce is useful (and I've heard it highly spoken of by a semi-professional chef) because it's high in glutamates which taste meaty (umami) but that's just a guess.

Re: Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

#23

Post by fapjacks »

madaxe_again wrote: post #13
leashless wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Garum is fish sauce, I think?

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.

You can buy garum today, from manufacturers that claim to follow recipes hundreds of years old. The process is claimed to be unknown, but this is in fact not true: A couple of descriptions exist of the process, for example how it was made in Caesarea, in Judea, which also manufactured murex purple dye.

Re: Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

#24

Post by fapjacks »

sorokod wrote: post #14
madaxe_again wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

#25

Post by fapjacks »

lawlessone wrote: post #21
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's mysterious is what it was. Now that we know that it seems like there's several non-controversial paths for how it could have got where we found it.

I imagine it was used to carry the captured souls of pedantic people.

Pedants.

Re: Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

#26

Post by mirimir »

mcphage wrote: post #2

> 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.

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.

Re: Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

#27

Post by fapjacks »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #15
empath75 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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…

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).

Re: Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

#28

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

fapjacks wrote: post #23
madaxe_again wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can buy garum today, from manufacturers that claim to follow recipes hundreds of years old. The process is claimed to be unknown, but this is in fact not true: A couple of descriptions exist of the process, for example how it was made in Caesarea, in Judea, which also manufactured murex purple dye.

For me it is a mystery how a product made all around the Mediterranean in antiquity died out almost completely. Why didn't people in southern France, for example, keep eating garum until the modern day? Was it just changing tastes, sudden loss of necessary ingredients due to breakdown in trade, or recognition that parasites inside fish could survive the garum-making process?

Re: Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

#29

Post by Gibbon1 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #6

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 - Bu…

They probably would want to know about that.

Re: Mystery of Chedworth's 1,800-year-old Roman glass shard solved

#30

Post by hestipod »

fapjacks wrote: post #23
madaxe_again wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can buy garum today, from manufacturers that claim to follow recipes hundreds of years old. The process is claimed to be unknown, but this is in fact not true: A couple of descriptions exist of the process, for example how it was made in Caesarea, in Judea, which also manufactured murex purple dye.

What does it taste like?
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