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.
