• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Sewage and water disposal in historical, non urbanized, societys

Phietadix

Auror
Title says it all really. I've found that sewage systems and water waste disposal are one of those things often overlooked in Fantasy. Despite my research into the topic, there also doesn't have a lot of information regarding it in relationship to non-urbanized societies; at least none that I have been able to find. (There is a lot, however, for urban environments. Greece and Rome are the two I see discussed most, but you can definitely find more about other ancient cities too)

Basically as far as I can get is, they used rivers. But that doesn't tell me what I want to know. How did they use rivers? How did they distinguish between grey-water waste and black-water waste? How did they avoid over polluting the river for those downstream, did they avoid polluting the river for those downstream? What about those people who didn't live near rivers, what did they do?

If anyone has done research into this topic, I would love to learn what you've found. Plus if you're good at research, I'd deeply appreciate if you'd consider looking into the topic; for any who want to take on the challenge I would gladly share the books I've found related to the topic (assuming I can find what I did with them)
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
I would have thought they filled a bucket and threw it out on the street, and then waited for the rain.

I could speculate a lot on this, but I am more willing to say this stuff happens and we'll just call it the stuff the reader can assume if they like, but I don't have to cover.

I would guess, that if the water did not look or smell right, they would avoid it. And I would also suspect sometimes they just got sick.

Ancillary: The settlers at James Town dug a well, but it had bacteria in it and they did not know. If they had instead dug it a 100 yards further in they would have had no issues, but they did not know. So they got sick and it affected their survival.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Much would depend on location. A shepherd or woodcutter is going to go just wherever. And did what we would call littering--leave unwanted material on the ground.

A village or other settlement introduces more difficulties. A river or stream is fine, but you still have to bring the slop to the river, and rivers can freeze. Latrines were common. So was a slop bucket where you carried it to a place and dumped it. That might have been in a waterway, usually downstream, but hardly always. No one in the villages was going to police this.

Besides, flowing water washes away a fair amount of yuck. Depends on rate of flow and amount of slop, of course, but a village of a couple hundred people isn't really a stress on the environment. For specific details you should look not to history but to modern anthropological accounts of pre-industrial or very rural people. The documentation and details will be richer.

One other thing: besides excrement (which is also fertilizer, btw) and rotting vegetable matter, there could be other materials. The one that spring to mind is the tanning process, because it involves not only chemicals but also animal bits in various stages of decay. In towns, the tanners were always put out on the outskirts, preferrably downwind.
 

Phietadix

Auror
Much would depend on location. A shepherd or woodcutter is going to go just wherever. And did what we would call littering--leave unwanted material on the ground.

A village or other settlement introduces more difficulties. A river or stream is fine, but you still have to bring the slop to the river, and rivers can freeze. Latrines were common. So was a slop bucket where you carried it to a place and dumped it. That might have been in a waterway, usually downstream, but hardly always. No one in the villages was going to police this.

Besides, flowing water washes away a fair amount of yuck. Depends on rate of flow and amount of slop, of course, but a village of a couple hundred people isn't really a stress on the environment. For specific details you should look not to history but to modern anthropological accounts of pre-industrial or very rural people. The documentation and details will be richer.

One other thing: besides excrement (which is also fertilizer, btw) and rotting vegetable matter, there could be other materials. The one that spring to mind is the tanning process, because it involves not only chemicals but also animal bits in various stages of decay. In towns, the tanners were always put out on the outskirts, preferrably downwind.

The angle of looking at modern Anthropology studies is one I hadn't really considered before, so thank you for that!

Do you have any particular suggestions for where to start looking on that front? Any particular researchers, Institutions, cultures, or even particularl works that you would recommend?
 

Phietadix

Auror
Much would depend on location. A shepherd or woodcutter is going to go just wherever. And did what we would call littering--leave unwanted material on the ground.

A village or other settlement introduces more difficulties. A river or stream is fine, but you still have to bring the slop to the river, and rivers can freeze. Latrines were common. So was a slop bucket where you carried it to a place and dumped it. That might have been in a waterway, usually downstream, but hardly always. No one in the villages was going to police this.

Besides, flowing water washes away a fair amount of yuck. Depends on rate of flow and amount of slop, of course, but a village of a couple hundred people isn't really a stress on the environment. For specific details you should look not to history but to modern anthropological accounts of pre-industrial or very rural people. The documentation and details will be richer.

One other thing: besides excrement (which is also fertilizer, btw) and rotting vegetable matter, there could be other materials. The one that spring to mind is the tanning process, because it involves not only chemicals but also animal bits in various stages of decay. In towns, the tanners were always put out on the outskirts, preferrably downwind.
Use in tanning is one I had heard of before, but I've only ever heard of that in around Victorian Era London.

If it helps, the specific work I'm looking at this for currently is one involving the Celts and Goths around 50 BC, and another separate project with those same two cultures, but around the Roman incursions into Germania
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
The era helps, but location is even more important. Army camp? City? Village?

Nudge me in a day or two for references.
 

Phietadix

Auror
The the one set in 50 BC is a Story based on Julius Caesar's invasion of the Gauls. It is essentially asking, in a Fantasy context, what if Rome wasn't able to conquer the Gauls, but Gaul instead held their ground, united with the other nearby Celtic peoples and the nearby regions of Carthage, Greece, Hispania, and North Africa, to force the Roman Republic back onto it's own peninsula. Sadly, I don't have a particular area of Gaul and or the Celts, but the historical premise should help clear some things up at least
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I did a bit of looking around on this and was reminded about midden heaps. These were simply the pre-modern versions of the town (or village) dump. Any number of things might be put here, and anyone had the right to dump there. Archeologists have mined these for decades. Also, while a village or town might have one or more of these, individual homes--especially those large enough to have their own property--might have their own midden heap. Also, various manufacturing operations might have theirs (e.g., butchers or anyone working in leathers). There were also heaps primarily for animal remains.rave

If you can brave the literature, here's the best way to research this or most any topic.
1. Use Wikipedia, but don't stop there
2. Search more widely, but scope the search to edu sites

Wikipedia is useful not only for the basic information, it's a way to discover other search strings. For example, you might start out searching for something like "ancient sewage systems" or the like. But a bit of browsing will show that the more useful search is on "waste management". You'll also quickly discover there is much more information for the Middle Ages than for the Ancient world. Also, and this is important, always scroll down to the References. That's the start for your bibliography.

Searching edu sites is done like this (I'll use the present topic)
"medieval waste management" site:edu
The site:edu part is the scoping. It will confine results to the .edu domain. Now, some of the stuff there will be behind a paywall or available only if you're at university, but you'll still find useful information and it will be meatier than without that scope. The quoted string is what you're searching on. It's worth learning the various search operators supported by the major search engines. It can not only save you time, it is how to look more deeply.

Anyway, I hope that gets you a bit further down the road.
 
In pre-modern plumbing China, and some other places, night soil fields were a thing (night soil being the euphemism for human waste). Cities and towns had night soil collectors, who went from house to house collecting what was in the chamber pots. They took it out to the night soil field, a designated spot where the waste was composted. When it had turned into dirt, it would be used to fertilize crops.

The same idea is now getting revived as composting toilets, for an eco-friendly alternative to flush toilets. The waste doesn't actually compost in the toilet, it goes to a container that has to be emptied out periodically and its contents taken somewhere else to compost. How safe its product is to use as crop fertilizer is under debate. Generally, it's only considered safe for orchards (where the compost will be around the trunks of the trees but it won't touch the edible part) and non-food crops, but some scientists believe it could be safe for direct contact with food crops as well. Thousands of years of the Chinese doing the same thing would seem to bear that out.

Modern composting toilets are mostly used on off the beaten path organic farms, so rural, and their owners typically do their own composting on site. In a fictional setting, towns and cities could have night soil collectors while isolated rural dwellers could set up their own small night soil field somewhere on their property. If there are enough farms close enough together for a communal night soil field, perhaps one could be shared by several farming families.

I don't know if night soil fields were used by the Gauls or Celts in the specific era you're looking at, but theoretically, they could have been.
 

Phietadix

Auror
I did a bit of looking around on this and was reminded about midden heaps. These were simply the pre-modern versions of the town (or village) dump. Any number of things might be put here, and anyone had the right to dump there. Archeologists have mined these for decades. Also, while a village or town might have one or more of these, individual homes--especially those large enough to have their own property--might have their own midden heap. Also, various manufacturing operations might have theirs (e.g., butchers or anyone working in leathers). There were also heaps primarily for animal remains.rave

If you can brave the literature, here's the best way to research this or most any topic.
1. Use Wikipedia, but don't stop there
2. Search more widely, but scope the search to edu sites

Wikipedia is useful not only for the basic information, it's a way to discover other search strings. For example, you might start out searching for something like "ancient sewage systems" or the like. But a bit of browsing will show that the more useful search is on "waste management". You'll also quickly discover there is much more information for the Middle Ages than for the Ancient world. Also, and this is important, always scroll down to the References. That's the start for your bibliography.

Searching edu sites is done like this (I'll use the present topic)
"medieval waste management" site:edu
The site:edu part is the scoping. It will confine results to the .edu domain. Now, some of the stuff there will be behind a paywall or available only if you're at university, but you'll still find useful information and it will be meatier than without that scope. The quoted string is what you're searching on. It's worth learning the various search operators supported by the major search engines. It can not only save you time, it is how to look more deeply.

Anyway, I hope that gets you a bit further down the road.

Thank you very much! You've given me quite few useful tools that should be very helpful for tracking down more information on this topic. I particularly think that using site:edu to help me narrow now my search results will help a lot! Currently I am using the DuckDuckGo search engine, rather than Google, but I think it should still work. I can also take a look at Midden Heaps, and see if they tell me anything that I could actually use in writing.
 

Phietadix

Auror
In pre-modern plumbing China, and some other places, night soil fields were a thing (night soil being the euphemism for human waste). Cities and towns had night soil collectors, who went from house to house collecting what was in the chamber pots. They took it out to the night soil field, a designated spot where the waste was composted. When it had turned into dirt, it would be used to fertilize crops.

The same idea is now getting revived as composting toilets, for an eco-friendly alternative to flush toilets. The waste doesn't actually compost in the toilet, it goes to a container that has to be emptied out periodically and its contents taken somewhere else to compost. How safe its product is to use as crop fertilizer is under debate. Generally, it's only considered safe for orchards (where the compost will be around the trunks of the trees but it won't touch the edible part) and non-food crops, but some scientists believe it could be safe for direct contact with food crops as well. Thousands of years of the Chinese doing the same thing would seem to bear that out.

Modern composting toilets are mostly used on off the beaten path organic farms, so rural, and their owners typically do their own composting on site. In a fictional setting, towns and cities could have night soil collectors while isolated rural dwellers could set up their own small night soil field somewhere on their property. If there are enough farms close enough together for a communal night soil field, perhaps one could be shared by several farming families.

I don't know if night soil fields were used by the Gauls or Celts in the specific era you're looking at, but theoretically, they could have been.

Thank you! This is something I will have to look more into as well. I similar to you, don't know how much the ancient north-western Europeans used similar practices to the pre-modern Chinese, but human is human so it should do some good for me to look into
 

Phietadix

Auror
I have a lot to look into here on my own time now, particularly for areas that are not adjacent to rivers. I think I will have to do some more research on the topics you have given me there before I can add anything of use to that part of the discussion. If either of you feel like doing anything more here while I am working on that, I feel like moving back over to the use of rivers would be where to move forward. I've have gotten enough that I should be able to do some more of my own research though, so thank you for that!
 
Top