Firewood

[Mithras]

Having tended fires for cooking, on camp and in the wild, a question came to me: where did the Roman population get their firewood? A single household will get through plenty, and from the centre of Rome to any discernable woodland is probably a long long way ...

I'm sure charcoal predominated (it was found on hearths at Pompeii). So was charcoal wagoned in every night all night?

I wonder how you bought it? Door to door sales (like coalmen here in the UK), or did you send slaves to a central point.

Along with corn and freshwater, this has got to be the third of the three most important commodities needed by a Roman citizen.

[andym]

Do you mean in the field or in town generally?

[Jona Lendering]

I do not know the answer, but I can give an indication of the demand.

If the city of Rome had one million inhabitants, and if the average life expectancy was 20 years, about 50,000 people died every year. To cremate them, one needed about 100,000 cubic meters of wood (I asked this at a crematory). An oak of about thirty years old has, on average, a volume of about 6-8 cubic meters. So we need more than 400,000 oaks to produce sufficient wood for the cremating of the Roman population only. (Or three million trees in Italy, with a population of seven million.)

Forests with these dimensions are not known in Latium; the wood needed to be transported from the Apennines. That this was difficult, can be shown: dead babies in ancient Rome were not cremated, but received a burial in an amphora. Wood must have been extremely expensive.

[Carlton Bach]

This might explain the Principate fashion for interment over cremation. Incidentally, are we sure cremation was always complete? I realise it's an icky subject, but when Hamburg University<y did experiments with cremation using pigs (to determine the state of preservation of jewelry worn by them) it turned out that partial cremation was a common outcome if the team underestimated the amount of wood, and you could still fit the pieces into an urn.

Firewood was a commercial commodity, as was charcoal. Cato lists 'brushwood' as a revenue-generating agricultural enterprise, raising firewood for the cities (and pork on the side). Speaking from experience, charcoal is far superior to wood of any kind for cooking purposes (though not for baking in ovens), but it must have been significantly more expensive, too, both per pound and energy output. So I suspect most households on a budget made do, as they did in medieval and early modern Europe, with inferior brushwood and scraps.

as to how they were sold, I don't know if there is any evidence, but I suspect like most agricultural products the wood would be brought to markets and buyers would go there. It's possible there were also house-to-house sellers (faggot gathering, and selling them door-to-door, was a source of extra income to rural poor in medieval times, but it depended on their traditional right to deadfall from the forest, something that I can't see Roman property law recognising).

[Jona Lendering]

Incidentally, are we sure cremation was always complete?

I think it was not. The example that comes to mind is the so-called tomb of Philip II of Macedonia in Vergina; I understand that the body was cremated but the skull and legs were still sufficiently preserved to reconstruct the man's face and establish that he had suffered from rachitis. (If I recall correctly.)

[Arahne]

I do not know the answer, but I can give an indication of the demand.

If the city of Rome had one million inhabitants, and if the average life expectancy was 20 years, about 50,000 people died every year. To cremate them, one needed about 100,000 cubic meters of wood (I asked this at a crematory). An oak of about thirty years old has, on average, a volume of about 6-8 cubic meters. So we need more than 400,000 oaks to produce sufficient wood for the cremating of the Roman population only. (Or three million trees in Italy, with a population of seven million.)

These 20 years are because of very frequent child mortality, especially new born and they where never cremated.

Now I see that somethings wrong with your calculation. If You need 100,000 cubic meters for 50,000 people that is 2 cubic meters for person (if you create ustrina for one person, and things were different depending on social status of the deceased, mostly few corpses were burnt on the same ustrina). So one tree is needed for 3 or 4 persons which is 16000 or 12000 tree's per year.

[mcbishop]

Having tended fires for cooking, on camp and in the wild, a question came to me: where did the Roman population get their firewood? A single household will get through plenty, and from the centre of Rome to any discernable woodland is probably a long long way ...

I'm sure charcoal predominated (it was found on hearths at Pompeii). So was charcoal wagoned in every night all night?

I wonder how you bought it? Door to door sales (like coalmen here in the UK), or did you send slaves to a central point.

Along with corn and freshwater, this has got to be the third of the three most important commodities needed by a Roman citizen.

The secret of firewood supply in the ancient world lies in woodland management. Cut a tree down and what happens? It does it's damnedest to regenerate; all that stuff with acorns, flying seeds and what have you is an insurance policy, the main means of reproduction of greenwood trees being by shoots. This leads to (since at least the Bronze Age and probably earlier) the practise of coppicing (and, to a less extent, pollarding) to exploit a given acreage to produce a given tonnage of brushwood. Coppicing is also essential to produce the poles for spearshafts, arrows, wattles and so on, since these possess an integral strength that chopped up lumber can never emulate. Woodland management must have been practised in the Roman world on a scale not seen again for a long time.

I would recommend reading any of the following by Oliver Rackham, a superb writer who manages to be both authoritative and highly readable at the same time. They are listed in order of size, the first being the smallest and most accessible, but they are all equally brilliant:

O. Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (Dent 1976)
O. Rackham, The History of the Countryside (Dent 1986)
O. Rackham, Ancient Woodland (Arnold 1980)

The last of these includes a discussion of Roman woodland fuel production on pages 107-9. Rackham points out that Cleere estimated that it took 84 tons of wood to make the charcoal to produce 1 ton of iron, needing 23,000 aces of managed woodland to supply the annual requriements of one-sixth of the industry (that sixth being the proportion for which quantifiable iron production data exist, or at least can be inferred from the waste), a third of the figure Cleere anticipated for simply felling lumber.

The problem with charcoal at Pompeii lies in the question of whether it was carbonized prior to the eruption, or whether the effects of superheated pyroclastic flows etc could make it look like it was charcoal when excavated.

Never think of the ancient world in terms of absolute consumption (a mistake far too many academics make - there are some truly nutty figures around on iron production based on supposed 'requirements' that ignore data like the above and overlook the widespread use of recycling in pre-industrial societies), which remains one of our most heinous sins and which the Romans by and large avoided.

Mike Bishop
[dismounts from hobbyhorse...]

[Jona Lendering]

I fail to see my mistake.

Now I see that somethings wrong with your calculation. If You need 100,000 cubic meters for 50,000 people that is 2 cubic meters for person [...]. So one tree is needed for 3 or 4 persons which is 16000 or 12000 tree's per year.

If I need 12000-16000 thirty-tear old trees/year, I need a forest of more than 400,000 trees. I'm nor a mathematics hero, so what's my mistake?

[john m roberts]

This is a fascinating subject, and one I confess I have given litltle thought. Some suggestions: It was my impression that most slaves, the poorest Romans, foreigners, etc. were not cremated but simply were tossed into the pits outside the city and buried. That would have cut down on the demand for cremation wood.
If nothing else, Romans were masters of farm management. Wildwood was getting scarce in Italy in Roman times, but it was absolutely full of orchards. Fruit trees have to be culled from time to time and old or inferior trees are cut down to make way for new ones. In China today fruit tree wood is a staple for things like gunstocks. Demolished buildings would be another source. There must have always been some timber that was not salvageable for further construction use.
The Romans had the example of Cyprus to see what happened when deforestation got out of hand. Almost all the island was stripped bare to fuel the copper smelting industry.

[Tarbicus]

I don't think it's too much of a problem as long as many acres of trees are maintained and grown for the purpose:
Spacing Cuttings

An acre isn't all that big either.

[Martin Moser]

From Weeber, Karl-Wilhelm. Smog über Attika - Umweltverhalten im Altertum. 1990: München, Artemis. (Smog over Attika - Environmental Behaviour in Antiquity):

In the 4th century firewood was first imported to Rome from Africa. At that time woods within easy reach in Italy, which was still called rich in woods in augustean times, seem to have been more or less eradicted, especially those on the shores of the river Tiber and on the Apennine (pp. 36ff). Most costly was of course shipbuilding.

As an aside, in augustean times ore from the isle of Elba had to be transported to the mainland for further processing because of a lack of fuel (pp. 68ff).

[Emeraldweapon7d]

Having tended fires for cooking, on camp and in the wild, a question came to me: where did the Roman population get their firewood? A single household will get through plenty, and from the centre of Rome to any discernable woodland is probably a long long way ...

I'm sure charcoal predominated (it was found on hearths at Pompeii). So was charcoal wagoned in every night all night?

I wonder how you bought it? Door to door sales (like coalmen here in the UK), or did you send slaves to a central point.

Along with corn and freshwater, this has got to be the third of the three most important commodities needed by a Roman citizen.

sorry to wander a bit off the topic but wasn't corn from the new world?

[Carlton Bach]

sorry to wander a bit off the topic but wasn't corn from the new world?

Only if you're speaking American English

[Matt Lukes]

sorry to wander a bit off the topic but wasn't corn from the new world?

What we in North America call corn is known to the rest of the world by its proper name, 'Maize'. 'Corn' is what we call 'Wheat'. I don't know exactly why this is the case, but there it is. It's kind of analogous to the whole 'football' thing- what the rest of the world knows as 'football', for some reason we call 'soccer' even though what we call 'football' has an extremely limited pedal element (unless your team sucks and has to punt every few downs) :lol: So, if you ever hear or read of 'corn' in the ancient world, don't think of the yellow stuff that's great dried and popped, but think of bread.

Matt

[tlclark]

It's not just cooking and heating. There's ceramic, glass and brick kilns, blacksmithing and whole other industries as well. The imperial baths consumed huge quantities of charcoal as well!

Fikret Yegeul (spelling?) indicates in his book that the reason the baths of Diocletian have half the number of hot rooms as previous baths is the expense and/or lack of firewood.

Woodland management is more or less a modern thing. Years ago I wrote on the Roman baths and the lack of firewood. All the evidence seemed to indicate that most of S. Italy was denuded by the late 2nd C. with large volumes of timber and wood coming from N. Italy, Dalmatia and Dacia at great shipping cost to make up the difference. It was costly, but there were no better alternatives it seems.

Again, I invoke the Hamblin rule, it's not the inconvenience or cost of something that makes its use improbable, it's only its convenience or cost relative to the best available alternative, and it just seems the Romans ran out of wood, but I have a theory on likely substitutes.

It's not just timber stands that were used as sources of charcoal. River willows are fast growing and abundant and make excellent charcoal, and needed to be cleared to make way for portages, landings, and other features, yet there were vast expansive wetlands at the mouths of all the major Italian rivers were willow bushes were prevalent. These needed to be removed to keep seaports and river channels open. A lot of this went into basketry and other industries, but undoubtedly, a lot into charcoal, kiln firing and bath heating as well. At least that's my speculation.

Travis

Update and qualifier:

I looked over Bishop's original post and saw that the type of woodland management he is discussing is far from modern methods I thought he was suggesting. Greenwoods and brushwoods are in fact fast growing and the first incipient species to take over a clear cut area. Prospering brush and greewoods, or willows is easy, and not at all like moderning managing modern forests, so I do think that is possible and the brush might have been preferrable in some aspects.