Lead

Lead is a kind of metal that is very heavy. (See if you can get some lead, like a fishing weight, to see how heavy it is). It is pretty common in Europe and around the Mediterranean, and it was used throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. You use lead for weights on fishnets and for anchors and to weigh things, and you use it to mend broken pottery, and for water pipes. People also used it to clamp building stones together, inside stone walls.

A lead curse tablet
- thanks to VROMA

Sometimes people wrote curses on little pieces of lead and dropped them into wells (so evil spirits (who lived underground) would get back at their enemies). Lead is soft and easy to work, so it was very useful.

The biggest problem with lead is that it is also poisonous. People knew this in ancient Greece and Rome, just as we know it today. They could see that when people who were enslaved were forced to go into lead mines, they got sick and died in two or three years from breathing the lead dust. Greek and Roman doctors and scientists wrote about it. And that's why they made slaves go into the mines - free men and women wouldn't do it.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, people used to go to the old Roman buildings and dig the lead clamps out from between the stones, because that was cheaper than mining lead out of the ground. You can still see the holes in many Roman buildings, like these in the Colosseum at Rome.

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