Latrine
Description
Margareta Staub Gierow
The entire space on the floor is taken up by the quite large latrina of the house. Its entered from roomw in the west. Just inside the entrance a gutter starts sloping down towards the east. In the south east corner of the room it turns north and runs through the north wall of the house into a channel in the sidewalk (approx. 1.2 m from the north east corner of the insula). The width of the gutter is minimized from 0.63 m near the entrance to 0.3 m at the corner and 0.1 m at the north wall. The channel in the sidewalk is made of mortar and tiles and runs towards the street. In the framing stone of the sidewalk a hole is drilled through to let the liquid either run away or be collected for use for example in a cloth manufacture.
The latrin itself is separated from the gutter by means of a low wall, preserved up to 0.1-0.15 m and 0.1m (at the north)- 0.27 m wide. The bottom of the latrine´s chute is made of thre reused rooftile overlapping each other from east to west and running downwards towards a supposed "pozzo nero" in the adjacent room w. The seat of the toilet was probably palced near the west end , next to the downpipe from the upstairs toilet. Thus the chute could be rinsed with water from the east, probably it also served to get rid of waste from the adjacent kittchen (room t.
