Doctoral Dissertation Improvement - The Effects of Urbanism in Imperial Rome (31BC-324AD): A Bioarchaeological Study of Migration, Diet, and Disease

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

By the height of the Roman Empire, the 14 km2 city of Rome had a population of between 750,000 and one million people living within its walls and an additional 500,000 to 750,000 lower class Romans living just outside the city walls in an area called the suburbium. The primary research objective for this dissertation project is to take advantage of the information that Imperial period cemeteries can contribute to our knowledge of demography, migration, diet, and disease in order to contextualize the living conditions of lower-class Romans during the Imperial period, an age of unprecedented growth and population density. A peak in both suburban and urban populations during the Imperial period would have put great pressure on the suburbium and its lower-class residents to accommodate additional housing, infrastructure, and cemeteries.Life in the Imperial Roman suburbium was by all accounts crowded, unsanitary, violent, and impoverished. Although the average Roman diet has been reconstructed through literary sources, stable isotope analysis provides a reliable way to reconstruct past diets based on samples from skeletal tissue. This technique can determine the contribution of marine resources to a mostly terrestrial diet because specific food resources have diagnostic ratios of stable carbon (13C/12C) and nitrogen (15N/14N) isotopes. The focus will be on determining what foods are being consumed as well as differential access to food by class and gender.Visual assessment will be made of all individuals for evidence of dietary deficiencies, growth disruptions, and dental disease and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy. If ancient Romans were consuming large amounts of grain, they were at risk for protein-calorie malnutrition as well as vitamin deficiency diseases such as scurvy and rickets. Romans living in the suburbium were among the lower classes of society and held jobs that required significant amounts of physical labor, the results of which might be seen in their skeletons.Classical scholars debate whether the increase in the urban population of Rome in the Imperial period resulted from a natural increase in Italic peoples or from the influx of foreigners and slaves. Samples of these populations will be analyzed for strontium isotope ratios (87Sr/86Sr), which reflect local geology and thus can be used to examine residence and migration in ancient populations.The broader impact of this project is that by adding bioarchaeological analysis to the historical and archaeological information that has been used to reconstruct the daily lives of ancient Romans, a more complete picture of lower-class suburban life will emerge. The potential for studying urbanism at a time in Roman history when the population was at its peak is vast. Investigating migration, diet, and disease in the largest urban center in ancient Europe will aid in the formulation of a new model of urban development and a deeper understanding of the plight of the common people. This study assists in graduate student training and in the collaboration of individuals interested in ancient urbanism from the perspectives of both the social sciences and the humanities.