Ancient Dog Paw Prints Found Near Roman Fort

Humans have had canine companions for as long as 40,000 years, so archaeologists were excited but not overly surprised when they stumbled upon pupper paw prints while excavating a 1,900 year-old Roman settlement in Romania. "It's exciting to discover an entire ecosystem that lived alongside humans and imagine the dogs chasing each other over the drying bricks," archaeologist Andrei Buta, who works at the site, told Newsweek. The prints were discovered in the civilian settlements that once stood around the site of an ancient Roman fort known as Apulum, which is located in the modern Romanian city of Alba Iulia. Research is being carried out over an area of more than 2000 square meters (over 20,000 square feet) and the site dates back to the 2nd century AD.

"The paw prints are fortunate finds in the roof and wall tiles from a luxurious Roman building," Buta said. Most likely, the dogs lived near a tile workshop that produced roofing material for local houses. While running through the workshop yard, the dogs may have stepped in soft, drying clay, leaving their paw prints in the surface. Dogs were a popular pet in the ancient Roman world and canine figures are often depicted in paintings and pottery from the Roman period. "Dogs were important loyal pets for the Romans too and they weren't used just for guarding property," Buta said. In his book Naturalis Historia, the writer Pliny the Elder described how dogs could be used to soothe period cramps by holding them close to the body, and breeding for smaller "toy dogs" took place in the Roman era. "The existence of small dogs as pets, objects of affection and special consideration for their owners, has been known since classical antiquity, a fact corroborated by texts, epigraphy and iconography," Rafael M. Martínez Sánchez, an archaeologist from the University of Granada, told website All That's Interesting.

However, according to the University of Chicago, the most popular breeds in ancient Rome and Greece were the Laconian and Molossian, two large breeds of hunting dogs. "The paw prints we found are quite large so it's safe to say they were made by larger breed dogs," Buta said. Dogs were not the only animals to have walked around Apulum, and Buta said that the team had found evidence of other species too, as well as imprints from caligae, open sandal-like boots. "Analyzing the fragments of bricks found on site…we often find glimpses of the Roman brickyards captured in the drying clay: caligae hobnails, dog and cat paw prints or traces of bird footprints," he said.

Read more

• Ancient marble slab revealing Roman emperor's "secret" journeys discovered
• Newly discovered Pompeii victims found crushed to death in utility room
• Ptolemy's lost manuscript discovered in book found in medieval abbey

Update 07/04/2023 13:03 p.m. ET: This article has been updated to refer to Andrei Iosef by his family name, Andrei Buta.