Angela
Elite member
- Messages
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- Ethnic group
- Italian
Well, it's a little too big to be a pocketwatch, as it's about the size of a coffee mug, but it is portable, a portable sundial, as a matter of fact. I guess it was for the Type A personalities among them. What I really like is the whimsy that made it look like a prosciutto or ham. 
The researchers are calling it the pork clock, but it should be the "prosciutto clock"!
See:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...ndial-pork-clock-pompeii-archaeology-science/
"While excavating an ancient Roman villa buried in volcanic ash, 18th-century workers found an unusual lump of metal small enough to fit in a coffee mug. Cleaning it revealed something both historically important and hilarious: one of the world’s oldest known examples of a portable sundial, which was made in the shape of an Italian ham.
Now the “pork clock” ticks once more. Recently re-created through 3-D printing, a high-fidelity model of the sundial is helping researchers address questions about how it was used and the information it conveyed."
"Fixed sundials were everywhere in ancient Greece and Rome, but only 25 other portable sundials from antiquity are known, says Alexander Jones, a historian of ancient science at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, who was not involved in Parslow’s experiments. It’s not clear exactly when the Herculaneum clock was made, but it is either the oldest or second oldest surviving portable sundial, Jones says."
The researchers are calling it the pork clock, but it should be the "prosciutto clock"!See:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...ndial-pork-clock-pompeii-archaeology-science/
"While excavating an ancient Roman villa buried in volcanic ash, 18th-century workers found an unusual lump of metal small enough to fit in a coffee mug. Cleaning it revealed something both historically important and hilarious: one of the world’s oldest known examples of a portable sundial, which was made in the shape of an Italian ham.
"Fixed sundials were everywhere in ancient Greece and Rome, but only 25 other portable sundials from antiquity are known, says Alexander Jones, a historian of ancient science at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, who was not involved in Parslow’s experiments. It’s not clear exactly when the Herculaneum clock was made, but it is either the oldest or second oldest surviving portable sundial, Jones says."
