Roman Pork Clock (You Heard Me)
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER PARSLOW, 3-D PRINT BY CHRISTOPHER CHENIER, WESLEYAN DIGITAL STUDIO LAB
While excavating an ancient Roman villa buried in volcanic ash, 18th-century workers found an unusual lump of metal small enough to fit in a coffee mug. Cleaning it revealed something both historically important and hilarious: one of the world’s oldest known examples of a portable sundial, which was made in the shape of an Italian ham.
Now the “pork clock” ticks once more. Recently re-created through 3-D printing, a high-fidelity model of the sundial is helping researchers address questions about how it was used and the information it conveyed.
Fun Fact: the professor in question once forced me to spend most of a summer in a septic tank. But I didn’t mind! (it was a Roman septic tank in the Praedia Iulia Felice at Pompeii)
