The finding aligns with the harrowing accounts of second-century AD writer Apuleius, whose Metamorphoses IX 11-13 describes the backbreaking labour endured by men, women, and animals in ancient mills and bakeries.
Can’t speak as to this specific find, but it was common for slaves to be condemned to work in the mills or bakeries as a punishment. We don’t think of such things as gruesome today, but, well…
When the day was mostly past, and I was weary, they un-harnessed me, removed my collar, and tied me to the manger. Though I was utterly exhausted, urgently in need of restoring my strength, and almost dead from hunger, still my usual sense of curiosity kept me upright with its nagging: I neglected the pile of fodder, and was pleased to watch the life of that detestable mill.
You blessed gods, what a pack of dwarves those workers were, their skins striped with livid welts, their seamed backs half-visible through the ragged shirts they wore; some with loin-cloths but all revealing their bodies under their clothes; foreheads branded, heads half-shaved, and feet chained together. They were wretchedly sallow too, their eyes so bleary from the scorching heat of that smoke-filled darkness, they could barely see, and like wrestlers sprinkled with dust before a fight, they were coarsely whitened with floury ash.
While the description here is from a satirical work, it is contemporary (The Golden Ass, 2nd century AD) and can be judged to be accurate in broad strokes, even written with dramatic flair in a fictional adventure.
Can’t speak as to this specific find, but it was common for slaves to be condemned to work in the mills or bakeries as a punishment. We don’t think of such things as gruesome today, but, well…
While the description here is from a satirical work, it is contemporary (The Golden Ass, 2nd century AD) and can be judged to be accurate in broad strokes, even written with dramatic flair in a fictional adventure.