There’s a lot in our lives today that traces back to ancient Greece and the other cultures of the Aegean: our politics and philosophy, our art and architecture, and, apparently, our lead pollution. That’s according to a study of sediment cores from in and around the Aegean Sea, which found the earliest-known evidence of human-caused contamination from lead, and tied it to the area’s inhabitants around 5,200 years ago.
Published in Communications Earth & Environment, the study also identified an increase in lead contamination around 2,150 years ago. This coincided with a significant socioeconomic shift in the Aegean, as the ancient Greeks came under the control of the Romans and increased their output of silver as a result.
“Because lead was released during the production of silver, […] proof of increasing lead concentrations in the environment is […] an important indicator of socioeconomic change,” said Andreas Koutsodendris, a study author and a researcher at the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University, according to a press release.
Read More: Ancient Lead Poisoning May Have Contributed to the Roman Empire’s Downfall
Increased Production, Increased Pollution
The Aegean fostered some of Europe’s earliest civilizations, fueling cultures like the Minoans, the Myceneans, and the ancient Greeks. Setting out to study how these cultures treated their Aegean environments in turn, a team of researchers sampled a series of sediment cores from the sea’s coasts and seafloor.
Analyzing 14 separate sediment cores (several taken from aboard the METEOR and AEGAEO research vessels), the team found that humans had caused lead contamination a lot earlier than previously thought — approximately 1,200 years earlier, around 5,200 years ago. Their analysis also revealed that human-caused concentrations of lead surged in the Aegean around 2,150 years ago.
“The changes coincide with the conquest of Hellenistic Greece by the Romans, who subsequently claimed for themselves the region’s wealth of resources,” said Joseph Maran, a study author and an archaeologist at Heidelberg University, in the release.
Indeed, the Greeks increased their production of silver, and thus their pollution of their environment, after they fell to the Romans in 146 B.C.E., a change that likely caused the increased traces of lead in the sediments of the Aegean coast and seafloor.
Read More: Dangerous Amounts of Mercury Found in Soil of Ancient Maya
Lead, Pollen, and Land
The team says that the earlier traces of human-caused contamination were found in coastal sediments. In fact, the earliest evidence came from a core from a peat bog. But the later traces were found in seafloor sediments, too, with the surge some 2,150 years ago representing the earliest evidence of human-caused contamination in the ocean.
Preserving traces of pollen alongside traces of lead, the cores even allowed researchers to track Aegean land management over time, including the removal of forests and the clearing of agricultural fields that occurred in the area after Roman conquest.
Ultimately, their results reveal how the world of the Aegean was transformed — socially, economically, and environmentally — from 5,200 years ago to 2,150 years ago.
“The combined data on lead contamination and vegetation development show when the transition from agricultural to monetary societies took place and how that impacted the environment,” said Jörg Pross, a study author and a professor at the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University, in the release.
Read More: Lead Poisoning Is Still a Major Problem — Here's How it Impacts Our Health
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Communications Earth & Environment. Societal Changes in Ancient Greece Impacted Terrestrial and Marine Environments
Britannica. Aegean Civilizations
Britannica. Greeks, Romans, & Barbarians
Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
