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I'm a soil scientist myself.
A couple of years back, at a meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Professional Soil Scientists, we were treated to a presentation by a soil scientist who had worked on archaelogical projects around the globe for many years. Among other adventures, he had participated in the excavation of a villa belonging to one of the Roman emperors. He mentioned that he had sampled the soil around the villa and analyzed it for trace elements, and to his surprise, lead was present at levels many orders of magnitude above background level...and he couldn't figure it out.
I immediately surmised the source. Romans made a "party drink" by boiling grape juice down into a sweet syrup, and mixing it half-and-half with wine. The vessels they used for boiling the juice were lead...and consequently, the acidic juice contained enormous quantities of lead...and so, eventually, did many Romans.
The high concentrations of lead in the soil around the villa were no more than an artifact of drunken Romans venturing out into the yard to vomit or urinate after overimbibing. Most people at the meeting thought my claim to be wildly speculative, but I am certain that I am correct. The only other possible source would have been from a lead-smelting operation, and this grimy industrial activity surely wouldn't have been done on the premises of an emperor's party pad.