Enacting Health in the Medieval City: A Geospatial Analysis of Waste and Water in Bologna

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to the Archaeology of Health: Sewers, Snakebites, and Skeletons" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

What was a healthy and clean city in medieval Europe and how was this achieved? How did cities oversee the disposal of domestic and industrial waste and the preservation of clean water? This paper examines how refuse management was handled by households, workshops, and neighborhoods from AD 1200 to 1500 in medieval Bologna. Using archaeological data from 12 published excavations from across Bologna, along with historical population data in GIS, this paper examines how waste management spatially varied across the medieval city. How were different types of refuse (household, industrial, and sewage) managed? This information is correlated with the (1) canal system in Bologna (which was used for both industrial production and waste removal purposes), and (2) medieval public wells (which supplied water for many inhabitants of Bologna). Were their areas or zones within the city that bore a greater burden of material waste or polluted water? How were cleanliness and “public health” differentially experienced in the medieval city? In sum, this paper investigates the connections medieval people made between human behaviors and urban health, how health was enacted through the management of waste and access to clean water, and how this differed spatially among the citizens of Bologna.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Approaches to the Archaeology of Health: Sewers, Snakebites, and Skeletons

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33253