Lead often gets a bad press. But its discovery in ancient Graeco-Roman ink could make it easier to read an early form of publishing – precious scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

Some 800 scrolls, part of the classical world’s best-surviving library, have tantalised scholars since they were unearthed in a villa in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum in 1752. About 200 are in such a delicate state that they have never been read.

Unrolling the charred scrolls can destroy them, so people have been X-raying the bundles in the hopes of discerning the writing inside. But progress has been slow – it is difficult to detect the difference between the letters and the papyrus they are written on.

Now physicist Vito Mocella of the Italian National Research Council and his colleagues have revealed lead in the ink on two Herculaneum papyri fragments held in the Institute of France in Paris.

The presence of lead means that imaging techniques could be recalibrated to pick up the metal, something at which X-rays excel.

“This really opens up the possibility of being able to read these scrolls,” says Graham Davis, a reader in 3D X-ray imaging at Queen Mary University of London. “If this is typical of this scroll or other scrolls, than that is very good news.”

Trail of lead

This is not the first time someone has suggested that the Herculaneum papyri inks might contain lead. In 2009, computer scientist Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky in Lexington picked up on the presence of metal in the scroll ink.

Mocella’s team has now used a powerful particle accelerator known as a synchrotron to confirm that finding, challenging the long-standing wisdom that metal-based inks hadn’t been widespread until the 4th or 5th centuries AD. “From a historical point of view, it is a surprise,” says Mocella.

Mocella’s team suggests that the high concentration of lead makes it likely the metal was purposely introduced into the ink, rather than coming from water contamination or a metal inkpot. It could have served as a pigment or as a binding medium.

Whatever the lead’s use then, it seems to have a clear use now. “This is the way we will get back some of the lost knowledge of antiquity,” says Richard Janko, a classicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Mocella and his team will start X-raying scrolls from the National Library in Naples in July, with the scanners looking for lead.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: doi/10.1073/pnas.1519958113

The shopping mall is dead, so was it once alive? (Image: Seph Lawless)

WOULD you compare a shopping mall to a mountain? Or a wolf? Or a butterfly? In Thinking Like a Mall, Steven Vogel argues that it is unfair to care about the last three and consider them living, and not do the same for the shopping centres of this world. This may strike you as illogical or even absurd. But that is the point.

It is a provocative conceit that strikes at the heart of romantic notions of wilderness. But let us say we entertain the idea – what can it tell us about how we should live in the world? And about the things we create?

Vogel, a professor of philosophy at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, looks for answers in that most reviled of commercial ventures, the shopping mall. He has a specific one in mind, the City Center Mall in downtown Columbus, Ohio, which opened in 1989 and was demolished in 2010. Vogel delights in describing its dreary, occasionally garish, features: a giant, windowless edifice housing a Cinnabon bakery, winding escalators, outposts of Macy’s and The Nature Company, a scented-candle shop, big-screen TVs and, eventually, a tattoo parlour bearing the legend: “Put some class on your ass.”

Vogel admits he hated the place, which has now been replaced by a public park. Still, he argues that the mall had a life and a purpose of its own. Like a living organism, it thrived and then withered, at the mercy of social, political and economic currents, all forces outside direct human control – in other words, it was the product of “otherness”, much as a mountain is. “Why,” he asks, “does the destruction of a natural entity such as a mountainside raise moral questions while the demolition of a building does not?”

The problem is that, for most of us, the demolition of a building does raise moral questions. The choice of the City Center Mall gives his argument the frisson of controversy. If he had spoken up for Egypt’s pyramids, St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, or even the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Vogel might have struggled to find anyone to disagree with him. We may not grant a building the same moral, “living” standing as a wild wolf, but we will grant it some standing.

“We may not grant a building the same moral standing as a wild wolf, but we grant it some standing”

Vogel’s critique is not really directed at the general public, most of whom do care about birds, bees and buildings, albeit in a rather anthropocentric way. It is aimed at those who draw what he sees as an arbitrary line between things humans have had a role in creating, such as a mall, and those they haven’t, such as a mountain.

Vogel’s approach makes sense for an academic engaging with a largely American tradition that idolises the idea of wilderness embodied by places like Yosemite National Park. But elsewhere, the line between humans and nature and the built environment has never been so precise.

The Victorian founders of the UK’s National Trust, for instance, aimed to preserve “lands and tenements (including buildings)”. Their intellectual forefather, John Ruskin, felt as passionately about the stones of Venice as he did about the crags of the Lake District. And Vogel’s points entered mainstream policy decades ago: the International Union for Conservation of Nature, for example, recognises human-influenced landscapes as deserving protection, alongside nature reserves and wilderness areas.

Vogel spends much of the book laboriously unfurling his argument, building on work from the likes of Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx, as well as that of contemporary philosophers such as Eric Katz and Keekok Lee. He ends with the reasonable, if underwhelming, suggestion that we should take responsibility for the world we create.

Wild Life by Irus Braverman picks up that thread by looking at our struggles to take responsibility, in ways that are sometimes baffling, touching and even comedic.

Braverman, a professor of law at the University of Buffalo, the State University of New York, takes as a starting point the increasingly blurred line between protecting endangered species inside and outside their natural habitats. An old-fashioned view of the two approaches would be that some conservationists try to protect the panda in its forest home, while zoos encourage it to breed in a facility with other eligible ursines.

In reality, things are far more messy. In Braverman’s intriguing account, we learn that to bring the red wolf back from the brink, conservationists in the US regularly sneaked a few wolf puppies out of litters born in the wild, replacing them with cubs born in captivity to maintain genetic diversity in the population. “Does the mother notice?” Braverman asks the wildlife biologist heading up the programme. “She probably does,” he answers, “but the maternal instincts kind of take over, and it’s been successful.”

The lengths to which humans will go to save a species after we have driven it to the edge of extinction can be impressive. Perhaps the most striking example is the US government’s efforts to protect the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow. It’s a rather unremarkable-looking fish that lives only in the Rio Grande river, which now dries up every year because of irrigation and drought.

The fish can’t survive this human-created drought, so every spring, government biologists collect the minnow’s spawn on screens and then scoop it up with spoons. They gather some 64,000 eggs this way, and whisk them to hatcheries. After the egg-scooping, the team continues to monitor the river’s drying pools, rescuing stranded minnows and ferrying them to wetter parts of the river in SUVs. When the river fills again in the autumn, the minnows in the hatcheries are returned to their home waters, and the whole process starts again.

“The fish can’t survive drought, so biologists have to scoop up 64,000 eggs with spoons”

This may not accord with the definition of nature that most of us are used to, but then, perhaps we need to open our minds. If humans are now enmeshed in every web of life on Earth, then perhaps Vogel and Braverman are right that we should not defer to some outside force, whether that be “nature” or the invisible hand of the free market, to guide our actions.

The side of human nature that Braverman illuminates – the one that values other lives, and tries to preserve them – might be a better version of “nature” than most.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Is a shopping mall alive?”