Hmm…. Was this built by slaves?
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Likely partially. Slaves definitely were used on construction projects, but large-scale construction projects, like these aqueducts, would have included a majority-free force of unskilled wage laborers.
Funny enough, you probably would be more likely to see skilled slaves than unskilled slaves on such a project - unskilled slaves were used primarily in the worst and most tedious jobs that no one else wanted to do on the regular (mines, monocrop plantations, mills, bakeries); if you had a slave who you were going to employ full-time in construction, which was less horrid and also only intermittent in demand, it was probably someone with an actual skill, like an engineer.
The past is a strange place!