What do we know about people and their biology in Roman times? And how did the biology of such communities reflect social phenomena? Health, life conditions access to food, were profoundly different in Rome according to age and gender, but mostly to social status. Being an aristocrat or a servant meant having very different life expectancy, just as well as being a man or a woman, or an older individual as opposed to a young one. Everyday life during the Roman Empire was punctuated with constraints that landed upon an individual more or less at birth. Such constraints are easily traceable in the archaeological data, in the literary sources, in the iconography or the roman world, with little connection with its biological or ecological background.
There is an abundance of archaeological and historical data available on slavery in Roman times, tangible evidence of intangible, and often unseen, individual and collective experience. This research project aims at tracing the osteobiography of Roman slaves and poors by combining multiple levels of investigation on potentially the most informative social category of the roman world: the working class.
We will focus our investigation on an ancient cemetery along the Via Capenate, near the roman town of Lucus Feroniae (I ¿ III century CE). The town, a suburban center situated only a few kilometers from Rome, was home to a population of humble origin ¿ mostly servants, workers and freedmen ¿ making the site an ideal case-study. We will integrate osteological information with data deriving from the history of medicine, archaeobotany, chemistry, and food studies in an attempt to reconstruct the health status of ancient servants and workers, with the aim to reveal the profound impact of socio-cultural constructs on past life conditions.
The project has the potential to represent a true change of paradigm in our understanding of the biology of past roman communities. For the first time a combined approach that conveys archaeology, osteology, history of medicine, food studies, bone chemistry and genetics has the potential to unravel the osteobiography of enslaved people, revealing, at multiple levels of analysis, how harsh life can impact on human adaptation to the environment. The twofold aim of this project is to frame the figure of slaves in Roman times investigating a huge necropolis extensively excavated, and to reconstruct the osteobiography of single individuals that experienced slavery. This will provide an innovative model to study the servants¿ conditions during Roman times in Italy, a new insight for the reconstruction of past narratives. This project makes inroads into this topic through written sources, material culture, human remains and social behavior to understand data obtained relate to lifestyle and life history. This multidisciplinary research can help answering questions on the servants¿ lifestyle; their relative involvement in heavy tasks; inter-personal violence as a tool to induce work; and care provisions in critical health. The answers will shed light on how different lifestyles, diseases, pathological consequences and healthcare affected enslaved persons. Republican and Imperial times prove to be crucial in the history of slavery, as it is witnessed by holy places where protector gods were venerated (e.g. Lucus Feroniae with the temple dedicated to the goodness Feronia), and the numerous laws for the liberation of slaves (manumissio). Possibly for the first time a systematic work on lesser individuals ¿ normally ignored by literary sources and archaeological investigations ¿ will reveal life conditions for the majority of the individuals that inhabited Rome.