The Roman Empire was the first modern world, a multicultural amalgamation of nations, with highly developed economy and technology. One of the outstanding achievements of Roman culture was the development of aqueducts, elaborate systems to deliver fresh water to urban centres. The aqueducts are important for two reasons; they are the cultural and technological expression of a society that is our direct ancestor, with similarities and differences, and a study of aqueducts reveals much about this ancient society. Also, aqueducts transported water, one of our most precious resources, and can provide a benchmark on availability of water in the past. Modern water supply systems still use the same sources that the Roman engineers used, and an understanding of the state of groundwater and springs in antiquity is important to determine the future of the water reserves and supplies on which we will have to rely on in future.
Ruins of ancient aqueducts can reveal much about their construction and functioning, but not about the way they were operated, and about the kind and amount of water flowing through them. However, many aqueducts deposited calcium carbonate sediments which can provide such information.
Calcium carbonate deposited in Roman aqueducts is a new, high-resolution archive for environmental and archaeological studies. Aqueduct carbonate stores information on short- and long-term variations in temperature, rainfall, vegetation cover and traces of earthquakes, droughts, floods, wildfires, and volcanic eruptions with up to daily resolution. Yet, aqueduct carbonate offers comprehensive anthropogenic information through its connection to settlements served by water supply systems in which the archive formed. This applies because the archive is forming at the heart of ancient cities and recording the environment and society. This originality of aqueduct carbonate provides the opportunity to study the historical past, human interference with the environment, human activity aspects such as ancient water management and the impact of environmental forcing, natural or self-inflicted, on society, in the middle of urbanism. Hence, during this action, we investigated the potential of the carbonate archive in three aqueduct carbonate series from neighbouring sites in Southern France.
