Why does nobody talk about the tiny drainage holes on Roman pots being a whole plumbing system

Ivan Allen · 2026-10-08T19:30:03.889486+00:00

I was scrubbing a client's kitchen floor last Tuesday and staring at their little terracotta herb pots with the hole in the bottom, and it hit me that I had been thinking about those holes all wrong my whole life. Back in school I figured the hole in old pottery was just for hanging them or letting a string through, but last month I read that archaeologists digging at a site near Naples found rows of these pots set into the ground with the holes lined up, and they think it was for moving water or steam between them. I keep thinking about how you can hold a plain clay pot and completely miss that it was once part of something bigger. For folks who actually study this stuff, how do you tell a drainage hole from a hole that was made to connect to something else? Is it just wear patterns or is there more to it?

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Why does nobody talk about the tiny drainage holes on Roman pots being a whole plumbing system | Archaeology Discoveries - SMM Buzz