Archaeologists at Pompeii Archaeological Park identified the remains of a prison bakery where enslaved people were locked up with donkeys and forced to grind grain for baking bread. The cramped room contains only small windows secured with iron bars at the top of the wall. The floor still has indentations remaining from the animals that would have walked together, blindfolded, for hours in coordinated labor. These discoveries shed additional light on enslaved conditions in the ancient world. It is “a space in which we have to imagine the presence of people of servile status,” Pompeii’s director Gabriel Zuchtriegel said in a statement. “It is the most shocking side of ancient slavery […] reduced to brute violence”.
