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Kristina Killgrove
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May 2, 2012
02:08 PM
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Recipe for a Roman Diet

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

Humans evolved to be omnivores. We'll eat anything we can get our hands on - fruit, vegetables, beans, grains, meat - and we've invented innumerable ways to cultivate and refine those basic ingredients, particularly in the last 10,000 years or so since the agricultural revolution.

But diet in the past was limited, primarily by geography but also by social class or culture. Before the New World was discovered, Italian food had no tomatoes. Before the industrialization of food production, many items we think of as dirt cheap today, like salt, were too expensive for the poor to purchase. If you didn't live on the coast, you probably weren't eating seafood.

When we talk about ancient diets, then, we're looking primarily at commonalities - what the average person was eating - while at the same time understanding that omnivores make for a dietarily heterogeneous population. There is no singular "American" diet, but we can agree that most of us likely consume a large amount of corn-based products, which are cheap and ubiquitous in the form of corn syrup, tortilla chips, popcorn, etc. This reliance on corn, a crop native to the New World, means that the average American diet differs from the average European, African, or Asian diet. Biochemically, we can see this difference in carbon isotopes, and we can show that their value increased following the transition to maize agriculture in the Americas (see, for example, Tykot 2006). My carbon isotope value is almost certainly higher than that of most contemporary Europeans.

Roman-era Mosaic

Similarly, there is no singular "Roman" diet, particularly in the Empire when goods were moving around at astounding rates, although researchers agree that a heck of a lot of wheat was consumed by all social classes and that olives and olive oil contributed a number of calories and fat to most people's diets. Ancient historical sources also seem to agree that no one really liked barley and that millet was only consumed in times of struggle, as both of these grains make inferior bread compared to wheat (Garnsey 1988). Yet dried millet tended to keep longer than other grains, making it good for storage along with dry legumes like chickpeas, lupin beans, and lentils, the latter another food that was most often consumed in times of shortage.

Ordinary Romans - that is, small farmers, peasants, and rural slaves who made up the majority of the ancient Italian population - likely got a large chunk of their diet from their non-cash crops like millet, legumes, and turnips, at least based on what writers such as Columella, Strabo, and Galen tell us (Garnsey 1988). Their daily diet would have been a far cry from the exotic foodstuffs found at elite banquets. But, as Horace writes, "Ieiunus raro stomachus volgaria temnit" (Satires II, 2, xxxviii). A hungry stomach rarely scorns plain food.

In order to find out what kinds of plain food the ancient Italians were eating, bioarchaeologists are starting to perform carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of skeletons (e.g., Prowse et al. 2004, Prowse et al. 2005, Craig et al. 2009, Rutgers et al. 2009, Killgrove 2010). Biochemical analysis isn't perfect, as it only yields a very macro-view of the diet. That is, the carbon isotope ratio can provide information about the kinds of plants and grains consumed, and the nitrogen isotope ratio can provide information on the relative amount of legumes and fish consumed. But depending on the rate of bone turnover, which can be different in different people because of age or disease status, the C and N isotopes represent an average of the last perhaps 5-10 years of a person's diet. With that in mind, here's what the skeletons are telling us about what people were eating in the Roman suburbs and down along the coast during the Empire:

The carbon axis shows that the people living in the Roman suburbs and along the coast were eating mostly wheat and barley (C3 foods, which have lower carbon isotope values) rather than millet (C4 food, which has a much higher carbon isotope value, starting around -13.0 permil). But their carbon values are higher than a purely C3-based diet, so those could be affected by marine resources and/or consumption of animals that were foddered on millet. The nitrogen axis shows that most people were eating a terrestrial, fairly omnivorous diet, with the coastal population of Velia eating a surprisingly little amount of fish. The pure vegetarians would be at the low end of the N axis, and the pure pescatarians would be at the high end (along with breastfeeding infants).

So what is the recipe for a Roman diet? Well, it's a little bit of everything, really. But you wouldn't know that from reading the half dozen or so cookbooks that contemporary authors have written to approximate Roman cuisine. For example, my copy of A Taste of Ancient Rome, while it has much to recommend it, has just two recipes that include lentils and none that include millet.

In his Historia Naturalis, Pliny notes that Campania in particular is full of millet and that peasants often mixed bean-meal (lomentum) with millet flour. Since cooking and chemistry are two sides of the same coin, I decided to remedy this omission by creating an historically-accurate dish that a Roman peasant might have eaten but also one that would show up isotopically in the skeleton (if eaten in large enough quantities).

Roman Millet and Lentil Salad

Simmer 1/2 cup of lentils in 1 cup of water for 20 minutes, or until soft. Separately, simmer 1/2 cup of millet in 1 cup of water with a bit of butter for 15 minutes. Put aside to cool.
Mince 1/2 cup of onion, 1/4 cup of parsley, 2 tablespoons of fresh mint, and 1 clove of garlic. Add to grains.
In a separate bowl, mix 1/4 cup of lemon juice, 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, and 1 teaspoon salt. Pour over the salad and toss well.
Top with freshly cracked pepper.

Delicious!

I served myself up a bunch of this salad for lunch, and I garnished it with some other Roman staples to make it a balanced meal: a bit of cheese, olives, and dried apricots. It's delicious. Kind of like tahbouli, which coincidentally is my go-to dish on 90-degree weeks like this in North Carolina.

On Monday, I'll be serving this to my friend Sarah Bond's Roman history class at Washington & Lee, while I tell them about the information skeletons can give us that histories can't. Let's hope the students like it (and that it helps them remember something about isotopes and ancient diets)!

Bonum appetitionum!

References

... Read more »

Craig, O., Biazzo, M., O'Connell, T., Garnsey, P., Martinez-Labarga, C., Lelli, R., Salvadei, L., Tartaglia, G., Nava, A., Renò, L.... (2009) Stable isotopic evidence for diet at the Imperial Roman coastal site of Velia (1st and 2nd Centuries AD) in Southern Italy. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 139(4), 572-583. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21021

Prowse, T., Schwarcz, H., Saunders, S., Macchiarelli, R., & Bondioli, L. (2005) Isotopic evidence for age-related variation in diet from Isola Sacra, Italy. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 128(1), 2-13. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20094

Prowse, T., Schwarcz, H., Saunders, S., Macchiarelli, R., & Bondioli, L. (2004) Isotopic paleodiet studies of skeletons from the Imperial Roman-age cemetery of Isola Sacra, Rome, Italy. Journal of Archaeological Science, 31(3), 259-272. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2003.08.008

Rutgers, L., van Strydonck, M., Boudin, M., & van der Linde, C. (2009) Stable isotope data from the early Christian catacombs of ancient Rome: new insights into the dietary habits of Rome's early Christians. Journal of Archaeological Science, 36(5), 1127-1134. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2008.12.015

R. Tykot. (2006) Isotope Analyses and the Histories of Maize. Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize, 131-142. DOI: 10.1016/B978-012369364-8/50262-X

April 12, 2012
08:31 PM
100 views

Palaeopathology and Urban Decline at Imperial Gabii (Italy)

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

As I noted yesterday, I'm at the AAPA conference in Portland. Here's the poster I'm presenting today, which details the recent work I've been doing at Gabii.

(For those of you at the conference, I'm chairing Session 2, the poster session in human osteology/bioarchaeology, at the Plaza Level of the hotel. My poster is number 65, and I'll be hanging out with it from 10:30-11 and 2:30-3pm. Stop by and say hi!)

Palaeopathology and Urban Decline at Imperial Gabii (Italy)

Top - Map of Sites
Bottom - Gabine Plain

Background: Urbanism in Latium

The ancient city of Gabii emerged in the late first millennium BC during a wave of urban explosion that also saw the rise of Rome just 12 miles away (Becker et al. 2009). Gabii grew to one of the largest cities in the area by virtue of its geographic location at the intersection of several important roadways. Rumored to be the place where Romulus and Remus were educated, Gabii was a cultural icon for centuries. By the late Republican period (1st century BC), literary references to Gabii concerned its depopulation and insignificance in civic life.

Little archaeological investigation was undertaken at Gabii until 2007. One of the surprising finds was a makeshift Imperial-era necropolis. Since Roman cemeteries were traditionally located outside the walls of a city (Cicero de Legibus ii, 23, 58; Toynbee 1971), one of the salient features of the collapse of Gabii as an urban center is the reuse of the city as a necropolis. The question remains: Who was buried at Gabii?

Gabii Cemetery

Top - Map of Area B
Bottom - Excavated Burial
(courtesy the Gabii Project)

Area B at Gabii corresponds to a domestic structure dating to the mid-Republican period, followed in the early Imperial period by burials that were likely purposefully made within the abandoned structure. The sequence of burials in Area B has not been fully refined, but carbon dating of bones from three graves suggests the burial program began in the late 1st/early 2nd century AD and continued through at least the 3rd century AD (Becker 2011).

Most of the burials in Area B are aligned roughly east-west, but others, like Tomb 8 (the “lead burrito”), are more north-south in orientation. Skeletons were interred in simple pits, in amphorae, and in cappuccina-style graves, consistent with burial forms found in other Rome-area necropoleis (Musco et al. 2008; Buccellato et al. 2008). However, three burials contained lead sheeting, a practice not well-attested in Roman graves. The lead burials are not included in this presentation, as they will be studied further this summer.

The total number of Imperial-period skeletons from Area B is 23 – 5 subadults under the age of two, 7 females, 8 males, and 3 adults of indeterminate sex.

Pathological Conditions

Gabii can be directly compared with three other cemeteries in use during the 1st-3rd centuries AD: Casal Bertone, Castellaccio Europarco, and Vallerano (Killgrove 2010; Cucina et al. 2006). Demographic data show that the Gabine burial population is quite different, however, with no subadults between 2-18 years of age. None of the five children examined had evidence of cribra orbitalia, compared to much higher crude prevalence rates at the other sites. Of the adults from Gabii, 14 presented teeth or jaws for analysis. The Gabine population had worse dental health in terms of true prevalence rates of caries, calculus, abscesses, and antemortem tooth loss (AMTL) than did the other three populations. In comparing these frequencies using Fisher’s exact test, Gabii is statistically different (p≤.01) than Casal Bertone and Vallerano in caries, abscesses, and AMTL, and different than Castellaccio Europarco in the latter two conditions. Gabii is similar to Casal Bertone and Castellaccio Europarco in frequency of degenerative joint disease: 67%, 76%, and 63% CPR, respectively.

Dental Disease at Gabii

Interpretation

The urban area of Rome boasted a very heterogeneous population during the Imperial period owing particularly to the importation of slaves from other areas of the Empire (Killgrove 2010). Attempts to characterize the skeletal health of this disparate population, however, are only just beginning, and most reports do not list methods or individual-level data. Based on the information available to date, the Gabii skeletal series is different than those from other cemeteries near Rome in terms of demographics and frequencies of dental disease.

Osteological investigation of the Gabine population suggests a burial program biased towards adults and young children, and palaeopathological investigation suggests consumption of different foodstuffs and/or more physical stress compared with other groups from the same area and time period. It is currently unclear whether these differences can be directly related to the collapse of the city of Gabii.

Analysis of this site and the skeletons is ongoing. Future research will involve biochemical testing to investigate the diet and the geographical and biological backgrounds of the Gabines.

Download the Poster as PDF

Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Gabii Project, an international archaeological initiative whose goal is to investigate the history of the ancient urban center. Thanks are extended to Nic Terrenato (Project Director), Jeffrey Becker (Managing Director), and Marcello Mogetta (Vice Field Director) for access to the skeletons, permission to use the cemetery map and burial photograph, and for information on the chronology of the burials.

References

... Read more »

Becker, J., Mogetta, M., & Terrenato, N. (2009) A New Plan for an Ancient Italian City: Gabii Revealed. American Journal of Archaeology, 113(4), 629-642. DOI: 10.3764/aja.113.4.629

Cucina, A., Vargiu, R., Mancinelli, D., Ricci, R., Santandrea, E., Catalano, P., & Coppa, A. (2006) The necropolis of Vallerano (Rome, 2nd–3rd century AD): an anthropological perspective on the ancient Romans in theSuburbium. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 16(2), 104-117. DOI: 10.1002/oa.808

April 11, 2012
06:00 AM
85 views

Differential Diagnosis of an Unusual Lower Leg Pathology in an Imperial Roman

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

This week, I'm in Portland, Oregon, at the annual meetings of the Paleopathology Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. So in this post, I'm presenting my PPA poster. After you read it, feel free to weigh in on the diagnosis using the poll and/or the comments.

(For those of you at the conference, I'm poster number 48 and will be hanging out, answering questions and chatting, from about 3-4pm in the Pavillion Ballroom West. Please stop by to say hi!)

Differential Diagnosis of an Unusual Lower Leg Pathology in an Imperial Roman

Background and Context

A suite of skeletal pathologies was discovered on the remains of an older adult male from Imperial Rome.

Location of Casal Bertone cemetery
Map by K. Killgrove (2012)

The cemetery of Casal Bertone dates to the 2nd-3rd centuries AD and was situated in a periurban area just outside the city walls of Rome. The burial program included a large necropolis with simple inhumations in pits and a cappuccina as well as an above-ground mausoleum with niches for single and multiple burial. Archaeologically associated with the cemetery are a large villa, a network of plumbing, and a 1,000-square-meter building with almost 100 tubs each one meter in diameter, likely a fullery for cleaning cloth (Musco et al. 2008).

Individual F10A (Male, 50+) was buried in a niche in the mausoleum, suggesting higher social status than those in the necropolis and/or membership in a funeral guild. No grave goods were found associated with him, however. Over 75% of the skeleton was recovered from the burial.

Skeletal Pathologies

Top - L tibia; both fibulae
Middle - L navicular, cuboid, calcaneus
Bottom - L metatarsals, R metatarsals
Photographs by K. Killgrove (2007)

F10A had a number of pathological conditions. He lost most of his teeth antemortem. Significant arthritic changes (porosity, lipping, osteophytes) were noted in his TMJ, shoulder, elbow, hip, and knee joints, as well as in the thoracic and lumbar spine. No rhinomaxillary changes were seen.

The bones of his legs present pathologies inconsistent with solely age-related changes:

L tibia – remodeled periostitis of the postero-medial aspect of the shaft; posterior aspect thickened, with spicules of bone; no evidence of cloacae; tibia is heavier than normal; periostitis and osteophyte formation at fibular notch
R/L fibulae – osteophyte formation on lateral aspect of proximal ends; periostitis on shafts; remodelling of distal ends
Tarsals – osteophytes and porosity of L calcaneus, L navicular, and L cuboid (at the MT4/5 articulation)
Metatarsals – resorption of proximal end and destruction of head of L MT5; resorption and porosity at proximal end of two other L MTs; distal end of R MT1 significantly resorbed; resorptive foci in distal R MT5; additional resorptive changes in two other MTs, both proximally and distally

Differential Diagnosis

Several possible diseases could have caused lytic lesions to the feet and legs of F10A (Ortner 2003).

Leprosy – Erosive changes in the feet, particularly the tapering of the metatarsal heads, are similar to those seen in leprosy. The classic rhinomaxillary changes associated with leprosy were not seen in the skull, although F10A was missing most of his teeth. Leprosy is unlikely but cannot be ruled out.
Sarcoidosis – Granulomatous bone lesions also occur in the phalanges with sarcoidosis, but the metatarsals are less often affected. F10A has only a few phalanges, but the distribution of lesions does not suggest a diagnosis of sarcoidosis.
Rheumatoid Arthritis – Lytic lesions are common in RA, which often affects the skeleton symmetrically, especially the hands. F10A’s foot lesions are symmetrical and erosive, but tarsal and metatarsal joints are not commonly involved in RA. Still, RA or another erosive arthropathy cannot be ruled out (Killgrove 2010).
Mycetoma – Multiple lytic foci characterize the skeletal involvement in this infection. Most often affected are the metatarsal, tarsal, and ankle joints, but the tibia and fibula can also become infected. The widespread, almost bubbly lytic lesions of F10A’s feet strongly suggest mycetoma.

Mycetoma

Saltus fullonicus
Relief from the Museo della Civilta
Romana, taken by K. Killgrove (2007)

Mycetoma (or Madura foot) is a longstanding, progressive infection often found in populations that go barefoot and engage in agricultural work. It is endemic to the region between 15°S and 30°N latitude but has also been reported in southern Italy and Greece (Plehn 1928). Migration during the Roman Empire, including importation of slaves, means that pathogens were not necessarily confined to one location.

The Roman fullery involved large tubs of caustic liquid, in which fullers would stamp cloth while barefoot–a task called the saltus fullonicus–which suggests a possible link between lower leg pathology and occupation. Yet mycetoma is difficult to diagnose in ancient remains. A possible case from 4th century AD Israel (Hershkovitz et al. 1992) was later found to have leprosy (Spigelman & Donoghue 2001). No such testing has been done on F10A to date.

Osteological data, archaeological context, and geographic location suggest a diagnosis of mycetoma for individual F10A, but it is difficult to conclusively rule out leprosy and rheumatoid arthritis.

Time for a poll!

What disease does this skeleton have?
Leprosy
Rheumatoid Arthritis
Sarcoidosis
Mycetoma
Other (Explain in comments!)

... Read more »

Hershkovitz, I., Speirs, M., Katznelson, A., & Arensburg, B. (1992) Unusual pathological condition in the lower extremities of a skeleton from ancient Israel. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 88(1), 23-26. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330880103

Spigelman M, & Donoghue HD. (2001) Brief communication: unusual pathological condition in the lower extremities of a skeleton from ancient Israel. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 114(1), 92-3. PMID: 11150055

March 29, 2012
06:37 PM
117 views

Leprosy in an Imperial Roman Child

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

There's an interesting article that's just been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology on possible leprosy in a 4- to 5-year-old child from the Imperial-era Roman suburbium. It's by Mauro Rubini and Paola Zaio (who previously published evidence of a leper warrior from Italy), Mark Spigelman and Helen Donoghue (who have published on aDNA evidence of leprosy), and Yilmaz Erdal (who seems to have provided the sample from Turkey) -- "Palaeopathological and molecular study on two cases of ancient childhood leprosy from the Roman and Byzantine Empires."

The gist of the article is that evidence of leprosy in children is quite rare in the palaeopathological literature, possibly because the characteristic bony changes seen in the disease - rhinomaxillary syndrome or facies leprosa - are more often identified as pathological in adults, whose skulls have fully formed. So the authors are presenting information on two subadults with bone changes to the skull - one from Imperial-period Italy and one from Byzantine-era (8th-9th century AD) Turkey.

Skeletons from Martellona
(credit)

The ancient Roman child comes from the necropolis of Martellona, a site that was located along the via Tiburtina, quite close to Tivoli in the Roman suburbium. Rubini reports that there are over 400 excavated graves and that the cemetery was in use from the 6th century BC through the 4th century AD. For the most part, burials were in cappuccina style, and "the site shows an economy substantially agricultural and very poor." The child in question dates to the 2nd-3rd centuries AD according to grave goods (two nearby burials were carbon dated to 193 AD +/- 25 years), and all that remains of the skeleton are the cranium, mandible, left clavicle, and first and second left ribs. Unlike the Byzantine cemetery, where two males and one female in addition to the infant showed pathognomonic characteristics of leprosy, the Roman cemetery did not present any other evidence of leprosy in the population.

Bony changes in the skull of the Roman child are considerable. There is erosive activity in the maxilla, including resorption of the area where the right central and lateral incisors would have been, and erosive activity and remodelling of the anterior nasal spine, the inferior portion of the nasal aperture, and both inferior nasal conchae. The forehead slopes backward, and there is pitting and a cloaca in the hard palate. The Byzantine child, on the other hand, has no signs of leprous lesions other than porosity of the occipital and parietals endocranially.

In their differential, the authors rule out lupus, actinomycosis, mucormycosis, sarcoidosis, treponemal disease, and noma. For the Roman child, the authors conclude that:

Fig. 4 from Rubini et al. 2012

Important osteological changes are present in the rhinomaxillary region. The resorption of the anterior nasal spine, the enlargement and rounding of the piriform aperture and erosion of the alveolar margin accompanied by the loss of the front teeth shown in our case are the classic changes seen in leprosy referred to as facies leprosa. [...] Furthermore, the perforation of the hard palate is present. This last change is strongly pathognomonic in leprosy diagnosis. An initial examination of the Martellona sample for M. leprae DNA in the Jerusalem laboratory was unsuccessful (data not shown).
So, the bony evidence in the Roman child is suggestive of the leprous changes we normally see in adults, but the DNA test was negative. In the Byzantine child, there were no lesions indicative of leprosy, but a DNA test was positive for M. leprae. That's odd.

The findings in this study are interesting, but there are several questions that I would have raised had I reviewed this article:

What is the context of the Roman child? There are no published data from Martellona, either osteologically or archaeologically, even though it was excavated over a decade ago according to this brief mention of the cemetery. I'd never heard of the cemetery until today (which isn't surprising, since there is a considerable amount of Italian bioarchaeological literature published in ways that are hard to find in a web or library search in this country), but there are also no citations to this cemetery anywhere in the article.

Why was the Byzantine child tested for leprosy? I suspect that the association with other leprous individuals in the cemetery and the curious porosity on the endocranial surface of the skeleton led researchers to suspect leprosy. But this is not specifically remarked on in the paper. It does seem that the three adults with pathognomonic lesions were subject to DNA testing and at least one was positive for M. leprae. The case for the presence of leprosy in the Byzantine population as a whole is much stronger than the case for leprosy in the Roman population, although little is mentioned about the Byzantine population in the article.

How do we know that facies leprosa is the same in subadults as in adults? The authors note that "Today there are no literature or hospital reports on children under 4-5 years with lepromatous leprosy that show such an involvement of the bones, even in underdeveloped countries where the medical control is difficult." They further note that "studies on leprosy sufferers in the absence of drug therapy show changes in the rhinomaxillary skeletal region only after about 7-10 years from the likely date of infection. Therefore, this is the most likely reason why today children under 14 years of age with leprosy do not show significant changes in the facial bones." The Roman child has significant bony changes to the face, suggesting advanced leprosy -- so the child would have to have been infected very young, even in utero -- and still the time-frame is off. Of course, it's possible that leprosy (or this particular form) was more aggressive than it is today, but now we're just guessing.

I'm disappointed that the Roman skeleton did not provide DNA evidence of leprosy because, as the authors note, "the case of Martellona is the first case in Italy (and possibly the world) of a child under 5 years of age with a clear rhinomaxillary syndrome." And so I'm skeptical about Rubini and colleagues' conclusions with respect to the Roman child because:

The skeleton is incomplete. After all, it was just a head. Who knows what lesions may have been on the postcranial skeleton and how those lesions may have affected a differential diagnosis?

There is a complete lack of contextual information about the population. Did other skeletons have evidence of leprosy? Tuberculosis? Other conditions considered in the differential?

There is no DNA evidence of M. leprae.

The Byzantine case is a bit more straightforward, though, leading the authors to write:

The case from Kovuklukaya displays no pathognomonic bone changes for leprosy but the palaeopathology is consistent with a chronic inflammatory response and specific PCR is positive for M. leprae DNA. We believe that this is the youngest individual in the world known to have had leprosy in the past. In sum, this study suggests that skeletal changes on young children must be analyzed in detail and aDNA analys... Read more »

Rubini, M., Erdal, Y., Spigelman, M., Zaio, P., & Donoghue, H. (2012) Paleopathological and Molecular Study on two Cases of Ancient Childhood Leprosy from the Roman and Byzantine Empires. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. DOI: 10.1002/oa.2242

Rubini, M., & Zaio, P. (2011) Warriors from the East. Skeletal evidence of warfare from a Lombard-Avar cemetery in Central Italy (Campochiaro, Molise, 6th–8th Century AD). Journal of Archaeological Science, 38(7), 1551-1559. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2011.02.020

Spigelman M, & Donoghue HD. (2001) Brief communication: unusual pathological condition in the lower extremities of a skeleton from ancient Israel. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 114(1), 92-3. PMID: 11150055

March 21, 2012
08:27 AM
136 views

From Birth to Burial: the Curious Case of Easter Eggs

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

Ever wonder why the humble egg is the focus of the most important Christian holiday? The egg is ubiquitous and cheap today, often the product of backyard coops managed by hipsters keen on urban farming. But this incredible, edible source of protein was, millennia ago, a potent religious symbol.

Earth and Sun at the Equinoxes (credit)

It all started with the spring or vernal equinox (which, this year, is today). During the equinox, the sun is directly over the equator, and sunlight is (basically) evenly distributed between the north and south hemispheres. Numerous cultures around the world have celebrations for the beginning of spring. For example, in Japan, today is a national holiday, Vernal Equinox Day, where families visit graves of their ancestors and hold reunions. Prior to 1948, the day was celebrated as a Shinto holiday, Koreisai, a time to pray for a successful growing season and a time to venerate the ancestors. And modern Egyptians today celebrate the national holiday of Sham el-Nessim, going on picnics and eating lettuce and onions, foods that were customarily offered to the ancient Egyptian gods for Shemu, or the start of the third Egyptian season, a holiday that dates back to around 2700 BC.

So spring is the start of a new growing season, a rebirth of crops that have been dormant through the winter and the beginning of a time of plentiful food, a time that was crucially important for the yeomen of antiquity who lived perpetually on the edge of famine. The relationship between the start of spring and the return of crops can also be seen in ancient Roman culture. The month of March was named for the Roman god Mars, who - in addition to his role as the god of war - was also a god of fertility; sacrifices for the health of one's cattle were often made to Mars Silvanus (Cato, de Agricultura LXXXIII). And it was Julius Caesar who established the date of the spring equinox in his calender reform of 45 BC, fixing it as March 25 (a date that was later changed to March 20/21 through the vagaries of leap days in the first few centuries AD).

The spring equinox has long been important in reckoning time in the political sense - from the ancient Iranian calendar, which began on the vernal equinox, to the Julian calendar. But it's also quite important in reckoning time in the religious sense. In Jewish tradition, Passover was originally intended to track the vernal equinox, although reforms in the Hebrew calendar in the fourth century AD mean the celestial event doesn't determine the date of Passover anymore. And in Christian tradition, Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. In fact, our word Easter comes from an Old English word referring to the month of April, named after the pagan goddess of the dawn. (In other modern languages, Easter is called a variant of Paschal, a word that can refer to either Easter or to Passover, demonstrating the strong link between these two Judeo-Christian celebrations.) Spring is a time to celebrate - whether it's the start of the year, the season for sowing, the release of slaves from Egypt, or the resurrection of a savior, spring means starting anew.

Chocolate Eggs (credit)

But back to eggs. Most of us take for granted the association of eggs with Easter, particularly when that association involves the words Cadbury, Kinder, or Reese's. But before the egg became firmly linked to Christianity, it was a symbol of life dating back at least 2,500 years.

Our first historical records of egg symbolism in religion date to about 500 BC. In the Achaemenid period, the Iranian calendar was influenced by Zoroastrianism, and the spring equinox - the first day of their calendar year - became a holiday. Called Nowruz, this holiday is often celebrated today by decorating, sharing, and eating eggs, and may have been celebrated similarly in the past, as a carved relief from Persepolis (dating to around 500 BC) seems to depict noblemen carrying colored eggs:

Relief from Persepolis (credit: Encyclopaedia Iranica)

But it's not clear that the Persians had much of an influence on early Christianity. To see the beginnings of the egg as a Christian symbol, then, we have to look at the Roman world. In pagan times, eggs were part of the Bacchic or Dinoysian mysteries, possibly a chthonic symbol (Macrobius, Saturnalia 7.16); they could be used to cast spells and, conversely, to offer protection (Clarke 1979). A fortified castle was built in the 15th century in the Bay of Naples, but legend has it that the poet Virgil (1st c BC) buried an egg on the site for protection, hence the modern name of the structure: Castel dell'Ovo.

Hatchling (credit)

The symbolic uses of the egg varied in the Roman world, but the link betw... Read more »

J.P. Alcock. (1980) Classical religious belief and burial practice in Roman Britain. Archaeological Journal, 50-85. info:/

March 13, 2012
12:39 PM
191 views

Childbirth and C-Sections in Bioarchaeology

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

Basically since we started walking upright, childbirth has been difficult for women. Evolution selected for larger and larger brains in our hominin ancestors such that today our newborns have heads roughly 102% the size of the mother's pelvic inlet width (Rosenberg 1992).

Yes, you read that right. Our babies' heads are actually two percent larger than our skeletal anatomy.

Fetal head and mother's pelvic inlet width

Photo credit: Evolution-of-man.info

Obviously, we've also evolved ways to get those babies out. Biologically, towards the end of pregnancy, a hormone is released that weakens the cartilage of the pelvic joints, allowing the bones to spread; and the fetus itself goes through a complicated movement to make its way down the pelvic canal, with its skull bones eventually sliding around and overlapping to get through the pelvis. Culturally, we have another way to deliver these large babies: the so-called caesarean section.

Up until the 20th century, childbirth was dangerous. Even today, in some less developed countries, roughly 1 maternal death occurs for every 100 live births, most of those related to obstructed labor or hemorrhage (WHO Fact Sheet 2010). If we project these figures back into the past, millions of women must have died during or just after childbirth over the last several millennia. You would think, then, that the discovery of childbirth-related burial - that is, of a woman with a fetal skeleton within her pelvis - would be common in the archaeological record. It's not.

Archaeological Evidence of Death in Childbirth

Two recent articles in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology start the exact same way, by explaining that "despite this general acceptance of the vulnerability of young females in the past, there are very few cases of pregnant woman (sic) reported from archaeological contexts" (Willis & Oxenham, In Press) and "archaeological evidence for such causes of death is scarce and therefore unlikely to reflect the high incidence of mortality during and after labour" (Cruz & Codinha 2010:491).

The examples of burials of pregnant women that tend to get cited include two from Britain (both published in the 1970s), four from Scandinavia (published in the 1970s and 1980s), three from North America (published in the 1980s), one from Australia (1980s), one from Israel (1990s), six from Spain (1990s and 2000s), one from Portugal (2010), and one from Vietnam (2011) (most of these are cited in Willis & Oxenham). Additionally, I found some unpublished reports: a skeleton from Egypt, a bog body from England, and a skeleton from England.

The images of these burials are impressive: even more than child skeletons, these tableaux are pathos-triggering, they're snapshots of two lives cut short because of an evolutionary trade-off.

The wide range of dates and geographical areas illustrated in the slideshow demonstrates quite clearly that death of the mother-fetus dyad is a biological consequence of being human. But what we have from archaeological excavations is still fewer than two dozen examples of possible childbirth-related deaths from all of human history.

Where are all the mother-fetus burials?

As with any bioarchaeological question, there are a number of reasons that we may or may not find evidence of practices we know to have existed in the past. Some key issues at play in recovering evidence of death in childbirth include:

Archaeological Theory and Methodology. From the dates of discovery of maternal-fetal death cited above, it's obvious that these examples weren't discovered until the 1970s. Why the 70s? It could be that the rise of feminist archaeology focused new attention on the graves of females, with archaeologists realizing the possibility that they would find maternal-fetal burials. Or it could be that the methods employed got better around this time: archaeologists began to sift dirt with smaller mesh screens and float it for small particles like seeds and fetal bones.

Death at Different Times. Although some women surely perished in the middle of childbirth, along with a fetus that was obstructed, in many cases delivery likely occurred, after which the mother, fetus, or both died. In modern medical literature, there are direct maternal deaths (complications of pregnancy, delivery, or recovery) and indirect maternal deaths (pregnancy-related death of a woman with preexisting or newly arisen health problems) recorded up to about 42 days postpartum. An infection related to delivery or severe postpartum hemorraging could easily have killed a woman in antiquity, leaving a viable newborn. Similarly, newborns can develop infections and other conditions once outside the womb, and infant mortality was high in preindustrial societies. With a difference between the time of death of the mother and child, a bioarchaeologist can't say for sure that these deaths were related to childbirth. Even finding a female skeleton with a fetal skeleton inside it is not always a clear example, as there are forensic cases of coffin birth or postmortem fetal extrusion, when the non-viable fetus is spontaneously delivered after the death of the mother.

Cultural Practices. Another condition of being human is the ability to modify and mediate our biology through culture. So the final possibility for the lack of mother-fetus burials is a specific society's cultural practices in terms of childbirth and burial. In the case of complicated childbirth (called dystocia in the medical literature), this is done through caesarean section (or C-section), a surgical procedure that dates back at least to the origins of ancient Rome.

Cultural Interventions in Childbirth

It's often assumed that the term caesarean/cesarean section comes from the manner of birth of Julius Caesar, but it seems that the Roman author Pliny may have just made this up. The written record of the surgical practice originated as the Lex Regia (royal law) with the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius (c. 700 BC), and was renamed the Lex Caesarea (imperial law) during the Empire. The law is passed down through Justinian's Digest (11.8.2) and reads:

Negat lex regia mulierem, quae praegnas mortua sit, humari, antequam partus ei excidatur: qui contra fecerit, spem animantis cum gravida peremisse videtur.

The royal law forbids burying a woman who died pregnant until her offspring has been excised from her; anyone who does otherwise is seen to have killed the hope of th... Read more »

D.W. Amundsen, & C.J. Diers. (1969) The age of menarche in Classical Greece and Rome. Human Biology, 41(1), 125-132. PMID: 4891546

J.P. Boley. (1991) The history of caesarean section. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 145(4), 319-322. info:/

C. Cruz, & S. Codinha. (2009) Death of mother and child due to dystocia in 19th century Portugal. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 491-496. DOI: 10.1002/oa.1069

W. Gilbert, D. Jandial, N. Field, P. Bigelow, & B. Danielsen. (2004) Birth outcomes in teenage pregnancies. Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine, 16(5), 265-270. DOI: 10.1080/14767050400018064

K. Hopkins. (1965) The age of Roman girls at marriage. Population Studies, 18(3), 309-327. DOI: 10.2307/2173291

K. Rosenberg. (1992) The evolution of modern human childbirth. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 35(S15), 89-124. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330350605

C. Wells. (1975) Ancient obstetric hazards and female mortality. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 51(11), 1235-49. PMID: 1101997

A. Willis, & M. Oxenham. (2011) A Case of Maternal and Perinatal Death in Neolithic Southern Vietnam, c. 2100-1050 BCE. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 1-9. DOI: 10.1002/oa.1296

Zlas, J., Stark, H., Seligman, J., Levy, R., Werker, E., Breuer, A., & Mechoulam, R. (1993) Early medical use of cannabis. Nature, 363(6426), 215-215. DOI: 10.1038/363215a0

February 17, 2012
01:57 PM
201 views

Using Votives to Visualize Reproductive Anatomy in Antiquity

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

Shrine to Madonna del Perpetuo Soccorso
in Largo Preneste (Roma) - Photo taken in
2007 by K. Killgrove.
A few blocks from my apartment in Rome was a shrine to the Madonna del Perpetuo Soccorso (Lady of Perpetual Help) in Largo Preneste. Every day in the summer of 2007, I walked or rode by it on my way to study the skeletons of the ancient Romans. This is not the home of the original Byzantine icon of the same name - although that does reside in Rome - but rather a roadside shrine, located at a busy intersection near a major public transportation stop in the outskirts of the city.

The shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Help includes flowers, candles, and dozens of plaques - mostly made out of marble - giving thanks for prayers that have been answered. Some are simple: Grazie, thanks. Some are spelled out: Per grazia/e ricevuta/e, For the blessing(s) received. And some just employ the shorthand: PGR. Many include a date and a name as well.

Every time I passed this shrine, I was struck by the pathos of one plaque in particular. It reads PER GRAZIA / RICEVUTA / : SABINA / ROMA, 1972 and is unique to this shrine because it includes a drawing of a stomach:

Detail of the shrine.
Photo by K. Killgrove, 2007.
This tradition of dedicating a body part to a divine figure, however, is not unique to Roman Catholicism. In fact, the practice may date back quite a long time in Italy and in other parts of the world. In the Greek world, so-called Asklepions dedicated to the god of healing have produced treasure troves of anatomical offerings from people desperate to be cured of their bodily afflictions. And there are more than one hundred similar sanctuaries in Italy, just in the area from Etruria to Campania, dating to the 4th-1st centuries BC (Turfa 1994). These Etruscan and early Roman objects are generally terracotta and are often mold-made, meaning the creation of anatomical votives was a steady business, but others were more crudely fashioned, probably by the individuals themselves. Offerings of various forms have been found, from swaddled babies to limbs to internal organs.

There's rather a large literature on votives in the Etruscan and Roman worlds, but researchers continue to question the purpose of anatomical votives, to try to suss out the ancient understanding of anatomy through identification of body parts, and to retro-diagnose the population based on the form and abundance of anatomical votives at healing centers (e.g., Cruse 2004).

This week on the blog of the Wellcome Collection, Catherine Walker writes about an object that has been identified as a Roman clay-backed uterus (dating to around 200BC-200AD). Specifically, she notes:
This observational understanding of medicine provides an interesting perspective when looking at the votives we have in the gallery. The knowledge of what was going on inside the body was limited, so what couldn’t be observed would have been assumed. If we take the votive uterus pictured above as an example, we can see that there was little knowledge of what the organ actually looked like. Autopsies would not have been carried out at this time; there are isolated cases in third-century BCE Alexandria, but these are not the norm. The form of this votive is based on assumptions and what observation could have been made. They would have been aware of the function of the organ and could have observed childbirth, so we see that this understanding has been incorporated into the votive as the wavy lines represent contractions. The question remains, though, should we assume a lack of knowledge on the part of the ancients, or should we question our assumption about what body part this represents? Either way, we can arrive at different interpretations of this object.

If the Etruscans and Romans really had no understanding of internal anatomy, can we safely say that this depicts what we know to be the uterus? That is, in modern anatomical knowledge, we understand the uterus and the vagina to be separate parts of a woman's reproductive anatomy. The vaginal walls are somewhat ribbed and the vagina terminates in an opening - is our assignment of the anatomical votive above to a uterus simply our assumption that reproduction was the most important gynecological problem for ancient women?

And yet the Etruscans and Romans knew a great deal about childbirth (and depicted it in ceramics), even if their understanding of the internal workings of the female reproductive system was shaky. Pretty much every woman - and probably lots of men - would have seen or attended a birth and would have been familiar with the delivery of the placenta. Could this votive object represent the placenta, which can be rather veiny and bag-like? Or perhaps it's a conflation of the uterus, placenta, and vagina? In a time before modern medicine and birth control, many women (and female domesticated animals) may have seen their own uterus if they suffered from uterine prolapse, which can look similar to the votive above (I'll let you google-image search that on your own, though).

Even among experts, the assignment of votives to specific parts of the human anatomy is problematic. In her review of the publication of the votives from Punta della Vipera, Jean Turfa (2004) writes that:
One model type, G11 (83-84, pl. 33,a) has often been identified as a bladder, but it closely resembles models found at Rome and Veii that must represent testicles; the Vipera version does have a different base or backdrop, however. Although they appear extremely stylized, sometimes described as cones or phallic markers, C.'s category G12 are, as she notes (84, pl. 33,b), intended to represent human hearts. One category remains problematical to all of us, C.'s G10 (82-84), identified as intestines. I now am convinced that this low-relief, oval model with undulating contours and central, teardrop-shaped organ, is in fact a deflated uterus, perhaps depicted as if just emptied of its fetus and still contracting back to normal shape. As C. notes, I originally identified the type as intestines, based on an example in the British Museum, but later amended the classification. The extra organ could be a vestigial uterus as on "normal" uterus models, or it could be a bladder or other appendage. Some examples seem to show the cervix (pl. 32, e); while the path of the intestines rendered on polyvisceral plaques can be traced, the folds on these smaller plaques are simply decorative and symmetrical.So even experts disagree about whether something represents a bladder or testicles, whether a votive is a penis or a stylized heart, and whether an object is a uterus or intestines. That's a lot of disagreement on pairs of organs that really look nothing alike. Many... Read more »

Baggieri, G. (1998) Etruscan wombs. The Lancet, 352(9130), 790. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(05)60686-1

February 8, 2012
04:35 PM
262 views

A Brief History of Bioarchaeology: Part II - Italy

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

Author's Note: This is the second post in what I envision as a series addressing the history and practice of bioarchaeology around the world. The first post was Part I - America.

Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.
[It was such a massive task to establish the Roman race.]
(Vergil, Aeneid 1.33)

One of the major themes of the Aeneid is the struggle of the protagonist to reach Rome. The burden of founding the population of Rome rests entirely on heroic Aeneas, and the quotation above illustrates the immense effort required to create what was, at the time, the largest city in the known world.

Aeneas Fleeing Troy, by F. Barocci, 1598 (credit)

With history and myth stretching back over two millennia, the biological and cultural origins of the Italian people are quite different than the story of the colonists in America. Modern anthropology in the American (Boasian) tradition has been characterized as “a bond between subject matters... part history, part literature, part natural science, part social science” (Wolf 1964). Most American anthropologists practice their research in a four-field manner that promotes an holistic approach to academic inquiry through incorporation of linguistics, culture, archaeology, and biology. Italian anthropology, on the other hand, is not as coherent a discipline as American anthropology -- archaeology can be found in either history or classics departments, physical anthropology is often found in biology departments, and cultural anthropology is split among four different subfields comprising cultural anthropology, (British-inspired) social anthropology, ethnology, and folklore.

The Italian and American anthropological traditions reflect a disparate response to differing subjects of inquiry and the contingencies of political history, and it's interesting to see where the two traditions paralleled one another and diverged, with the result that, today, bioarchaeology is a more mature discipline in contemporary American archaeology compared to Roman archaeology.

Classical Origins of Anthropology

Some would argue that the roots of Mediterranean anthropology can be found in ancient literature. Homer knew about the Scythians in the north and the Ethiopians in the south, and by the 8th century BC, Greek colonizing efforts expanded the oikoumene in all directions (Kluckhohn 1961). In the mid 5th century BC, Herodotus, reporting on the aftermath of a battle in the Persian Wars, wrote that (Histories 3.12.2-3):

The skulls of the Persians are so brittle that if you throw no more than a pebble it will pierce them, but the Egyptian skulls are so strong that a blow of a stone will hardly break them. And this, the people said (which for my own part I readily believed), is the reason of it: the Egyptians shave their heads from childhood, and the bone thickens by exposure to the sun (Godley 1982).

Geography of the Oikoumene (credit)

Herodotus noticed a difference in the thickness of the skulls of two populations of warriors lying dead after a skirmish, which he attributed to the sun. This explanation isn't correct, but he did foreshadow discussions in physical anthropology of the effects of the environment on the human skeleton.

For examples of early ethnographies, we can look to Roman authors from the first century BC. Julius Caesar was both a consummate military general and a thorough recorder of the peoples with whom he came into contact in his conquering expeditions. His observations about the ancient Gauls in the first lines of Commentarii de Bello Gallico include geographic dispersal and linguistic differences:

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae nostra Galli appelantur.

[All Gaul is divided into three parts: in one of these live the Belgae, in another the Aquitani, and in the third, the Galli, who call themselves the Celtae].
Lucretius, who wrote De Rerum Natura in the first century BC as well, included a more sophisticated idea of biological evolution than would be seen for thousands of years, and in the first century AD, Tacitus wrote an early tribal ethnography of the Germani, touted by some as “the finest tribal monograph prior to the 19th century” (Grottanelli 1977:593).

Although this written tradition of investigating the cultural Other was largely continuous for two thousand years, the academic tradition of anthropology in Italy was surprisingly slow to develop. Pre-anthropological literature was largely comparative in nature, intent on describing variations and similarities among cultures. Philosophically minded Italians such as Giambattista Vico and F.A. Grimaldi denied in the mid-to-late 18th century that there was a linear progression to culture and that there was such a concept as Rousseau’s l’homme naturel or noble savage.

In spite of the legacy of the Renaissance to questions about natural history, art, and literature in Italy between the 16th and 18th centuries, Italian anthropology did not exist until the middle of the 19th century. Even in this century, however, Italy’s fight for political independence and unity between 1860 and 1870 absorbed much of the energy of the country (Grottanelli 1977:594).

Anthropology in the Italian Academy

It is important to note that the nomenclature for subfields and areas of anthropological concentration is not the same in Italy as in the U.S. The term antropologia was originally used to mean the English equivalent of physical anthropology, “the natural history of the human family” (Grottanelli 1977:597). What we call cultural anthropology is known in Italian as etnologia, which is distinct from folklore studies (demologia or storia delle tradizioni popolari in Italian) and, to a lesser extent today, distinct from a theoretical, sociocultural anthropology sometimes called antropologia... Read more »

B. Bernardini. (1976) Italian anthropology. Man, 11(2), 283-283. info:/

Dyson, S. (1993) From New to New Age Archaeology: Archaeological Theory and Classical Archaeology-A 1990s Perspective. American Journal of Archaeology, 97(2), 195. DOI: 10.2307/505656

Grottanelli, V. (1977) Ethnology and/or Cultural Anthropology in Italy: Traditions and Developments. Current Anthropology, 18(4), 593. DOI: 10.1086/201970

Renfrew, C. (1980) The Great Tradition versus the Great Divide: Archaeology as Anthropology?. American Journal of Archaeology, 84(3), 287. DOI: 10.2307/504703

Saunders, G. (1984) Contemporary Italian Cultural Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13(1), 447-466. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.13.100184.002311

Wiseman, J. (1983) Conflicts in Archaeology: Education and Practice. Journal of Field Archaeology, 10(1), 1-9. DOI: 10.1179/009346983791504426

Woolf, G. (2004) The Present State and Future Scope of Roman Archaeology: A Comment. American Journal of Archaeology, 108(3), 417-428. DOI: 10.3764/aja.108.3.417

February 5, 2012
06:55 PM
247 views

The Forensics of Temperance Brennan

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

In the December issue of American Anthropologist, forensic anthropologist Heather Walsh-Haney published an interesting review article on the forensics in Kathy Reichs' series of Temperance Brennan novels (which have, of course, been further fictionalized as the FOX television show Bones - reviewed here by me).

Walsh-Haney appreciates Reichs' popular press books, noting that they do much to counter the "public's misguided and exaggerated expectations regarding the infallibility, ubiquity, and timelessness of forensic science" (p. 650). The novels in fact "comprehensively and correctly educate the public about forensic anthropology, including its limitations and challenges" (p. 651).

Another laudatory aspect of Reichs' books, according to Walsh-Haney, is the inclusion of participant-observation and ethnography. Most examples that I can think of from the books (and, yes, I have read every single one, cover-to-cover, mostly on airplanes), though, are more about Brennan interviewing suspects and witnesses and not what I'd consider Reichs' highlighting "both the holistic nature of anthropology and how those elements might be brought to bear by current [forensic] practitioners" (p. 651).

I do like that Walsh-Haney criticizes Reichs for her outdated use of race/ancestry: "Brennan uses the antiquated terms Caucasoid and Mongoloid to describe human diversity... the public's understanding of the practice of forensic anthropology would be further clarified on this point if Reichs were to use her fictional narrative to introduce the history behind the terms and current usage" (p. 651). One of the things that always annoys me in Reichs' books - aside from the un-complicated assessment of "race" - is that she (or her editor) always uses "phalange" instead of "phalanx" for each of the finger bones. I swear that word appears at least once in every book, and it just makes me cringe.

After reading Walsh-Haney's brief review article, I was a bit surprised by the high praise. Granted, Reichs' books are the best and most accurate of any forensic-true-crime series I've read (ahem, looking at you, Patricia Cornwell... ugh). But they can be readily critiqued. In the past, I have required all my undergraduates in Intro to Forensic Anthropology to read and review Reichs' Bare Bones in comparison with the information presented in Byers' Introduction to Forensic Anthropology text. (The guidelines for the review assignment are here for anyone who's interested). Unfortunately, I don't have notes or copies of students' papers, but we found plenty of fodder for a lively discussion of the realities of forensic anthropology and the liberties taken when writing a popular novel.

At any rate, now that I know it's possible to get published in American Anthropologist by writing about Temperance Brennan, I gotta put together an essay on Season 6 of Bones. (I'm only half joking.) The TV show is most definitely not as accurate as the book series, but it's entertaining and often informative. That counts for a lot.

Reference:

Walsh-Haney, H. (2011). Can Grave Secrets Be Revealed via Analysis of Bare Bones? How Kathy Reichs's Fiction Novels Feed the Public Perception of Forensic Anthropology American Anthropologist, 113 (4), 650-652 DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01379.x.... Read more »

Walsh-Haney, H. (2011) Can Grave Secrets Be Revealed via Analysis of Bare Bones? How Kathy Reichs's Fiction Novels Feed the Public Perception of Forensic Anthropology. American Anthropologist, 113(4), 650-652. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01379.x

January 20, 2012
09:19 PM
364 views

Lead Poisoning in Rome - The Skeletal Evidence

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

A friend alerted me to today's IO9 post, "The First Artificial Sweetener Poisoned Lots of Romans." It's a (very) brief look at some of the uses of lead (Pb) in the Roman world, including the hoary hypothesis that rampant lead poisoning led to the downfall of Rome - you know, along with gonorrhea, Christianity, slavery, and the kitchen sink.

Roman Lead Artifacts (clockwise from top left) -

curse tablet, shot, pipe, ingots, jewelry

The fact the Romans loved their lead isn't in question. We have plenty of textual and archaeological sources that inform us of the use of lead - as cosmetics, ballistics, sarcophagi, pipes, jewelry, curse tablets, utensils and cooking pots, and, of course sapa and defrutum (wine boiled down in lead pots) - but what almost all stories about the use of lead in ancient Rome miss is the osteological evidence.

But let's start with some contemporary medical knowledge. Metabolic disorders can be caused by a lack of nutrients - a lack of vitamin C gives you scurvy, and a lack of vitamin D gives you rickets - but they can also be caused by an abundance of something, like too much fluoride, too much mercury, too much arsenic, or too much lead.

Lead is a heavy metal, one that isn't needed by the human body, unlike vitamins C or D. This element is found in the environment naturally, so we do expect to find some amount of lead in the skeleton of every person, ancient or modern. But, because of the physical properties of lead - it can be made into hard, sharp things - people have been using it for millennia and thus have been exposed to heavy metal toxicity for millennia as well. The dangers of lead actually weren't well known until the second half of the 20th century, which was when lead was taken out of things like paint and gasoline.

The main problem with lead - the reason that it's toxic - is that it interferes with normal enzyme reactions within the human body. Lead can actually mimic other metals that are essential to biological functioning. But since lead doesn't work the same way as those metals, the enzymatic reactions that depend on things like calcium, iron, and zinc are disrupted. The most damaging enzymatic reaction that lead affects is the production of hemoglobin, or red blood cell production, which can cause anemia. So doctors in modern times often find anemia in a person with lead poisoning. Lead is also particularly problematic because it stays in the body for a very long time once it's absorbed, inhaled, or ingested. Most of it gets deposited in the bones and teeth. Lead can be removed from the body, excreted through the kidneys and urine, but it's a very slow process without modern chelation therapy.

Map of Imperial Rome and Suburbs

In modern society, lead poisoning is diagnosed through a blood test to determine the level of lead in the body. We don't have blood in ancient remains, of course, so we have to investigate lead through the levels we can measure in bone and enamel. As far as I know, the first and only study to actually measure levels of lead in skeletons from Rome is the one that involved my samples from the two cemeteries of Casal Bertone and Castellaccio Europarco (1st-3rd c AD).* The analysis was led by Janet Montgomery, now at Durham University, and also involved around 200 samples from Britain from the Neolithic to the Late Medieval periods (see below, Montgomery et al. 2010).

One of the charts from that article is below. The Romans are there in the middle. What you can see is that there are fairly low levels of lead in the earlier periods in Britain (Neolithic to Iron Age) and in the post-fall of the Roman Empire (5th-7th c AD). So what do those numbers mean on a scale of Normal to Lead Poisoned? Well, the modern recommendation by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control is that children should not have more than 1 mg/kg of lead in their bones (or 10 ug/dL measured in blood). Back to the chart, and no one in the Neolithic is getting poisoned. By the Iron Age, some people are above that level. The Imperial period is pretty special - we've got people with lead levels up to 30 mg/kg, which is 30 times higher than modern recommendations! In fact, this level is three times higher than the level the WHO considers "very severe lead poisoning."

Lead Concentrations from Britain and Rome

(Montgomery et al. 2010, Figure 11.2)

The chart below shows my Roman samples separate from the British samples. These are all median human lead concentrations. You can see a spike in the British samples during the Roman period, but the Romans themselves are so much higher, at least until the Medieval period, when people started working with lead again.

Median Lead Concentrations in Britain and Rome

(Montgomery et al. 2010, Figure 11.3)

It's not yet clear what the data mean, though, other than that some people likely had lead poisoning and others didn't. The sample size is fairly small, and more importantly, I don't know where people were living. That is, if the people buried at Casal Bertone and Castellaccio Europarco were living in an industrial area or were metalworkers, then they were more at risk for high levels of lead than were people not living in those areas a... Read more »

Aufderheide, A., Rapp, G., Wittmers, L., Wallgren, J., Macchiarelli, R., Fornaciari, G., Mallegni, F., & Corruccini, R. (1992) Lead exposure in italy: 800 BC-700 AD. International Journal of Anthropology, 7(2), 9-15. DOI: 10.1007/BF02444992

J. Montgomery, J. Evans, S. Chenery, V. Pashley, & K. Killgrove. (2010) 'Gleaming, white, and deadly': using lead to track human exposure and geographic origins in the Roman period in Britain. Roman Diasporas, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 199-226. info:/

January 19, 2012
08:30 PM
258 views

A Brief History of Bioarchaeological Ethics: Part I - America

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

A brief history of ethics within bioarchaeology, from the beginnings of bone collecting to current laws about Native American remains.... Read more »

Chatters, J. (2000) The Recovery and First Analysis of an Early Holocene Human Skeleton from Kennewick, Washington. American Antiquity, 65(2), 291. DOI: 10.2307/2694060

Deloria, V. (1992) Indians, Archaeologists, and the Future. American Antiquity, 57(4), 595. DOI: 10.2307/280822

Ousley, S., Billeck, W., & Hollinger, R. (2005) Federal Repatriation Legislation and the Role of Physical Anthropology in Repatriation. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 128(S41), 2-32. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20354

December 28, 2011
05:25 PM
332 views

Oedipus Rex and the Plague of Athens

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

A new article out in the January 2012 edition of the CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases is called "The Plague of Thebes, a Historical Epidemic, in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex." The authors' goal was to try to tease out whether the plague described in the play was an actual historical event, whether it was the same kind of plague known in historical records as the 5th century Plague of Athens, and which pathogen was the cause of this plague.

Plague of Thebes
by C.F. Jalabeat

Following a close reading of the ancient text, the authors conclude that the most likely causative agent was Brucella abortus, which causes brucellosis, a zoonosis that is easily passed to humans. It has low mortality rates - as evidenced by the fact that brucellosis can show up on the skeleton - so the authors suggest that perhaps this strain of Brucella was more virulent than previously known, or perhaps the plague referenced was actually multiple diseases affecting the Thebans in Oedipus Rex (and the Athenians in history) at once (leptospirosis, listeriosis, and salmonella, e.g.).

Since Sophocles is known as a realistic tragedian and since Greek tragedies were often placed within real historical frameworks, the authors believe that the plagues referenced in Oedipus Rex in Thebes and in historical Athens are one and the same. Their conclusion reads (p. 156):

The critical reading of Oedipus Rex, its comparison with Thucydides’ history, as well as the systematic review of the existing historical data, lead us to strongly suggest that this epidemic, for which the name Plague of Thebes may be used, was an actual historical fact, likely caused by B. abortus. With the deadly plague, which struck one of the most historic Greek cities, on the one hand and the tragic fate of a character who has become among the most recognizable in world theater on the other, Sophocles masterminded a dramatic frame and offered a lyrical, literary description of a lethal disease. As the protagonist approached his tragic catharsis, the moral order much desired by the ancient Greeks was restored with the end of the epidemic.
I'm not big on ancient-historical epidemiology, particularly in cases where there's not likely to be any skeletal data. Brucellosis can cause bony changes, but it can take years, so plague victims likely would show no signs of the condition. Also odd is that a fairly good case was made a few years back that the Plague of Athens wasn't brucellosis but rather typhus - DNA analysis on skeletons found in a mass grave just outside the Kerameikos cemetery dating to the appropriate time period found evidence of typhus (Papagrigorakis et al. 2006). Some have questioned this research (Shapiro et al. 2006), but as the recent sequencing of the Y. pestis genome has shown, clearly DNA/skeletal analysis is the way forward in ancient epidemiology. Close reading of Sophocles won't give us the answers we're looking for, although it could give us a way to start developing new hypotheses.

References:

Kousoulis AA, Economopoulos EP, Poulakou-Rebelakou E, Androutsos G, & Tsiodras S (2012). The Plague of Thebes, a Historical Epidemic, in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 18 (1), 153-157.

Papagrigorakis MJ, Yapijakis C, Synodinos PN, & Baziotopoulou-Valavani E (2006). DNA examination of ancient dental pulp incriminates typhoid fever as a probable cause of the Plague of Athens. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 10 (3), 206-214, PMID: 16412683.

Shapiro B, Rambaut A, & Gilbert MT (2006). No proof that typhoid caused the Plague of Athens (a reply to Papagrigorakis et al.). International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 10 (4), PMID: 16730469.... Read more »

A.A. Kousoulis, K.P. Economopoulos, E. Poulakou-Rebelakou, G. Androutsos, & S. Tsiodras. (2012) The Plague of Thebes, a Historical Epidemic, in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 18(1), 153-157. info:/

Papagrigorakis MJ, Yapijakis C, Synodinos PN, & Baziotopoulou-Valavani E. (2006) DNA examination of ancient dental pulp incriminates typhoid fever as a probable cause of the Plague of Athens. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 10(3), 206-214. PMID: 16412683

Shapiro B, Rambaut A, & Gilbert MT. (2006) No proof that typhoid caused the Plague of Athens (a reply to Papagrigorakis et al.). International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 10(4), 334. PMID: 16730469

November 22, 2011
04:07 PM
373 views

Cranial Vault Modification or Alieeeeens?

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

As usual, a Daily Mail article caught my attention with its first line, "A mummified elongated skull from Peru could finally prove the existence of aliens." The purpose of this kind of opener, of course, is to get people to read the tripe the Mail peddles. According to the article, "three anthropologists agree: it is not a human being." Well, if three unnamed Spanish and Russian anthropologists agree, then it must be an alien.

Alien? Uh, no. (Photo: The Nation)

Without even reading another line, though, I knew the subject of the article: cranial vault modification, a common practice around the world but particularly associated with ancient peoples of the Andes. And yet headlines from not particularly good news sites range from "Mysterious, triangle-shaped alien skull found in Peru" to "Malformed mystery mummy stuns world!" Cranial vault modification (CVM) is a pretty easy thing to accomplish, though. By applying continued pressure to certain areas of the still-forming skull, the bones of a child's head grow in a certain direction. Common methods of producing CVM include putting pressure with a board or other flat object on the occipital region (back of the head), the frontal region (front of the head), both occipital and frontal regions, and along a transverse axis. These methods generally result in flattening of the skull. Another method involves encircling the head with bands of fabric, which results in an often dramatic elongation of the skull as seen in the Peruvian mummy in this news this week.

An example of CVM from Cuzco (Credit)

Although the practice used to be called "cranial deformation," it has been renamed in light of the lack of evidence for any sort of pathology associated with it. That is, there may be minor anatomical abnormalities associated with CVM, but the practice does not seem to have interfered with brain growth or functioning in any way (Ortner 2003). CVM wasn't limited to the people of ancient Peru - the history of the practice has been traced back to the Old World, where a female skull with an annular CVM was found in Iraq dating to the 5th millennium BC (Gerszten and Gerszten 1995) - but it is perhaps best known in the mummies from the Andes. Theories as to the purpose of the practice range from reshaping heads to look more god-like (e.g., the maize god of the Mayas or the pathologically deformed head of the Egyptian ruler Akhenaten) to indicating a certain status or kinship, as indicated in the following historical documentation of the practice by Martín de Murúa among the natives of the Colca Valley (Peru) in 1590 (quoted in Cook 2007: 13):

The Collas…still use the practice of forming the heads of children in diverse manners or figures with much superstition, and in some places they make them very long that they call cayto uma, making them thin, and making them come to the form of a narrow and long bonnet that they call chucu; in other places they make the heads flat and wide in the front. That is called paltauma; of these they are generally from Cabanaconde…

Photo: ANDINA/Percy Hurtado

So let's take another look at the new child mummies found in Peru. The best coverage - and the best pictures (see right) - of the Andahuaylillas mummies that I found comes from the Peruvian news agency Andina. Anthropologist Elva Torres, head of the anthropology service at Cusco, studied both mummies. One isn't very well preserved and represents a child of less than one year old. The "alien" mummy is actually that of a 3- to 4-year-old child with a classic annular type modification, and Torres even notes that it's possible to see traces of the deforming pads on the skull. As a result of the modification, the child's eye orbits are larger than normal and the fontanelle (soft spot) hasn't yet closed. The rest of the skeleton, though, has evidence of normal growth. My Spanish isn't great, but it seems from the article like Torres is blaming the museum's director, Renato Davila Riquelme, for telling the press that the mummy is non-human. (Davila is indeed the one quoted in the Daily Mail story.)

Why are we so fascinated by cranial vault modification (CVM)? After all, we do weird things to our bodies and have for at least thousands of years - from the tattoos of Oetzi to the Chinese practice of foot binding to piercing our skin, most of us have modified our bodies in a permanent way. What's interesting about CVM, though, is that it was performed on young children who had no choice in the matter. Rather than a marker of personal identity like a tattoo or a piercing, CVM indicates that a person belonged to a certain group, it's a way of marking someone as belonging to you and your community. And that just doesn't sit well with contemporary American ideas of personal agency and choice.

Can you see the "deformity" on the left? (Credit)

The thing is, we still do reshape our childrens' heads. Anything other than a perfectly round, perfectly globular head is pathologized as Positional Head Deformity (PHD), and I'm sure many of you have seen small children wearing these head-shaping helmets at the park. PHD is on the rise because doctors have discovered that ... Read more »

Biggs WS. (2003) Diagnosis and management of positional head deformity. American Family Physician, 67(9), 1953-6. PMID: 12751657

Gerszten PC, & Gerszten E. (1995) Intentional cranial deformation: a disappearing form of self-mutilation. Neurosurgery, 37(3), 374. PMID: 7501099

November 4, 2011
01:26 PM
659 views

Line on the left, one cross each: Bioarchaeology of Crucifixion

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

As a researcher of the classical world, one of my favorite movies is Monty Python's Life of Brian. An irreverent take on the swords-and-sandals perception of the Roman Empire, it takes place in Jerusalem in the early first century AD and focuses on an accidental prophet named Brian. Anyone who's ever taken Latin has probably seen the portion of the film mocking Brian for his poor grasp of the language of power or the scene in which the leaders of the rebellion answer the question "What have the Romans ever done for us?" But the movie also satirizes the pugilistic, callous nature of the Romans in a crucifixion scene:

The Romans practiced crucifixion - literally, "fixed to a cross" - for nearly a millennium. Like death by guillotine in early modern times, crucifixion was a public act, but unlike the swift action of the guillotine, crucifixion involved a long and painful - hence, excruciating - death. So crucifixion was both a deterrent of further crimes and a humiliation of the dying person, who had to spend the last days of his life naked, in full view of any passersby, until he died of dehydration, asphyxiation, infection, or other causes. The Roman orator Cicero noted that "of all punishments, it is the most cruel and most terrifying" and Jewish historian Josephus called it "the most wretched of deaths."

Although crucifixion seems to have originated in Persia, the Romans created the practice as we think of it today, employing either a crux immissa (similar to the Christian cross) or a crux commissa (a T-shaped cross) made up of an upright post (stipes) and a crossbar (patibulum). Generally, the stipes was erected first, and the victim was tied or nailed to the patibulum and then hoisted up. Usually, there was an inscription nailed above the victim, noting his particular crime, and sometimes victims got a wooden support to sit on (sedile) or to stand on (suppedaneum) (Retief & Cilliers 2003).

The process of crucifying someone varied greatly, as recorded by Seneca in 40 AD:

I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with their head down to the ground, some impale their private parts, others stretch out their arms. -- de Consolatione ad Marciam
But often crucifixion involved driving nails into the wrists and the feet. Long, square nails (about 15cm long and 1cm thick) were hammered into the victim's wrists or, occasionally, the forearms, to fix him to the crossbar. Once the crossbar was in place, the feet may be nailed to either side of the upright or crossed. In the first case, nails would have been driven through the calcanei (heel bones), and in the second case, one nail would have been hammered through the metatarsals. To hasten death, the victim sometimes had his legs broken (crurifragium); the resulting compound fracture of the tibiae may have resulted in hemorrhage and fat embolisms, not to mention significant pain, thereby causing earlier death (Retief & Cilliers 2003).

Since the Romans crucified people from at least the 3rd century BC until Constantine banned the practice in 337 AD out of respect for Jesus and the cross's potent symbolism for Christianity, it would follow that archaeological evidence of crucifixion would have been found all over the Empire. Surprisingly, though, there is almost no direct archaeological evidence for crucifixion.

Several reasons can explain this lack of evidence:

The wooden crosses don't survive, having degraded long ago or having been scavenged and re-used by others.
Victims of crucifixion were criminals and therefore not formally buried, likely exposed or thrown into a river or trash heap. It is therefore difficult to identify their bodies, and their exposure to scavenging animals would have hastened the destruction of their bones.
Crucifixion nails were believed to have magical or medical properties, so they were often taken from a crucifixion site or victim. Without the smoking gun of a nail in place, it becomes difficult to interpret whether skeletal remains show evidence of crucifixion or were otherwise subject to taphonomic processes, like scavenger activity.
Injuries sustained by a person who was crucified were largely soft tissue in nature. However, if the person was subjected to crurifragium or had nails driven into his hands and/or feet, there would be osteological evidence of the practice in the form of perimortem tibia fractures and metatarsals or calcanei with clear sharp trauma (puncture wounds) to them.

Only one bioarchaeological example of crucifixion has ever been found. In 1968, Vassilios Tzaferis excavated some tombs in the northeastern section of Jerusalem, at a site called Giv'at ha-Mivtar. Within this rather wealthy Jewish tomb, Tzaferis came across the remains of a man who seemed to have been crucified. His name, according to the inscription on the ossuary, was Yehohanan ben Hagkol (Tzaferis 1985). Based on osteological analysis (Haas 1970), Yehohanan was about 24 to 28 years old at the time of his death. He stood roughly 167cm tall, the average for men of this period. His skeleton points to moderate muscular activity, but there was no indication that he was engaged in manual labor. With good dental and skeletal health, Haas (1970:55) suggests Yehohanan was "the Hellenistic ideal ephebe." A facial reconstruction was carried out based on cranial measurements with a good helping of artistry, and Yehohanan looks back at us two millennia after his death:

Facial reconstruction of Yehohanan ben Hagkol
Figures 4 and 5 from Haas 1970.

Of course, the most interesting feature of Yehohanan's skeleton is his feet. Immediately upon excavation, Tzaferis noticed a 19cm nail that had penetrated the body of the right calcaneus and the sustentaculum tali of the left calcaneus before being driven into olive wood so hard that it bent. Because of the impossibility of removing the nail and because the man was buried rather than exposed, we have direct evidence of the practice of crucifixion.

Calcaneus transfixed by an iron nail, from a 1st c AD Jewish
tomb at Giv'at ha-Mivtar. Figure 1, Maslen & Mitchell 2006.

Drawing of the calcaneus with nail. Figure 6 from Haas 1970.

Interpretation of the method of crucifixion is quite interesting. Haas (1970: 56-8) first thought that the lower limbs were in an "open" position, with the two calcanei crossed and fixed in the middle by an iron nail. Upon restoration of the bones, Haas changed his interpretation to suggest that the feet were adjacent, with the right foot first to receive the nail. Further, the right tibia and left tibia and fibula were all broken towards the distal (foot) end; the right tibia showed a comminuted, perimortem fracture, but the left tibia and fibula had simple oblique fractures. The right radius also presented a small "scratch" on the distal third of the interosseus border with the ulna. Haas interprets this as sharp trauma inflicted perimortem and suggests that it ... Read more »

N. Haas. (1970) Anthropological observations on the skeletal remains from Giv'at ha-Mivtar. Israel Exploration Journal, 30-59. info:/

Holoubek JE, & Holoubek AB. (1995) Execution by crucifixion. History, methods and cause of death. Journal of medicine, 26(1-2), 1-16. PMID: 7561527

Maslen, M., & Mitchell, P.D. (2006) Medical theories on the cause of death in crucifixion. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99(4), 185-188. DOI: 10.1258/jrsm.99.4.185

Retief FP, & Cilliers L. (2003) The history and pathology of crucifixion. South African Medical Journal , 93(12), 938-41. PMID: 14750495

Zias, J., & Sekeles, E. (1985) The Crucified Man from Giv c at ha-Mivtar: A Reappraisal. The Biblical Archaeologist, 48(3), 190. DOI: 10.2307/3209939

October 17, 2011
04:51 PM
543 views

Morbus gallicus in the Roman Empire

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

Italians called it the "French disease," the Dutch called it the "Spanish disease," the Russians called it the "Polish disease," and the Tahitians called it the "British disease." In the late 15th century, people around the world were blaming a particularly virulent, suddenly endemic disease on their improperly hygienic neighbors. The disease started off with a single chancre sore, then became a whole-body rash, and eventually caused people to go insane. In an era before antibiotics easily cured contagion, whole cultural groups needed someone to blame for mal de Naples, Arboyne pimple, Scottish sibbens, and Swedish saltfluss.

I'm talking, of course, about syphilis. In 1530, the Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro created the neologism in an epic poem he wrote about a man who was cursed with disease by Apollo. Syphilus may have been named after the son of the nymph Niobe, mentioned as Sipylus in Ovid's Metamorphoses and himself named after a mountain in Turkey that Niobe fled back to when Artemis killed her daughters and Apollo killed her sons. Fracastoro both named the disease and got in a dig at his cultural neighbors with his book, Syphilis sive morbus gallicus ("Syphilis, or, The French Disease").

Between about 1495 and 1550, there is quite impressive historical evidence on epidemics of syphilis in Europe, but records before 1493 are less clear, which leads us to one of the most important discussions in palaeopathology: Did syphilis originate in the Old World or the New World? We don't yet have an answer to this question in part because we don't really know whether the treponemal diseases - venereal syphilis, endemic syphilis (bejel), yaws, and pinta - are all caused by one species of bacteria in the Treponema genus or by different species. And we don't have an answer yet because of the palaeopathological record itself: it's not a normal population, since it only has dead people; those skeletons that seem most healthy may be from people who died before a disease could progress to bony changes; not everyone is dug up from the ground, etc.

Since the outbreak of syphilis in Naples, Italy, happened in 1494, the Columbian Exchange theory suggests that syphilis was a New World disease brought back by Columbus and his crew to Europe. Both skeletal evidence and recent genetic studies in the Americas seem to support the antiquity of a disease that was, if not modern syphilis, quite similar to the modern understanding of syphilis. On the other hand, the Pre-Columbian theory suggests that syphilis was present in Europe prior to Columbus' contact with the New World. Skeletal evidence of lesions that appear syphilitic in nature have been found in Europe dating to centuries before Columbus, and some palaeopathologists have concluded from rereading historical accounts that many descriptions of leprosy better fit the signs and symptoms of syphilis.

A new article just published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology details the latest skeletal evidence in the Pre-Columbian theory of treponemal disease: "A Roman Skeleton with Possible Treponematosis in the Northeast of the Iberian Peninsula: a Morphological and Radiological Study" (Rissech et al. 2011). In it, the authors argue that lesions from the tibia of a well-preserved 2nd-3rd c AD skeleton from Barcelona indicate the 25- to 30-year-old male suffered from a treponemal disease.

The authors' examination of the skeleton revealed that the left tibia was saber-shaped and that the upper half of its shaft was thickened. Further, the tibia had pitted areas and vascular grooves. A x-ray showed that the entire marrow cavity of the upper half of the tibia was completely closed up by new bone, and there was plenty of new bone formation on the outer surface of the tibia. These observations suggest a diagnosis of infectious disease that caused long-term inflammation. But was the infectious disease syphilis?

Example of caries sicca (credit)
Bone changes occur in syphilis between 2-10 years after the onset of the infection (Ortner 2003). Most often, a person suffers changes in the tibia and cranium, particularly in venereal syphilis. The tibia often has expansion of the shaft of the bone and an excess of new bone (periostitis), resulting in the characteristic saber shape. Sometimes, the tibia also has osteomyeitis - an infection of the bone marrow that results in openings in the bone to allow for pus drainage. However, diagnosis of venereal syphilis specifically has generally rested on finding cranial lesions - the "worm-eaten" appearance known as caries sicca. While the cranial lesions characteristic of the treponematoses are quite unique to the disease, they are also quite rare, occurring in 14% of cases of venereal syphilis and in only 4% of cases of endemic syphilis, whereas lesions to the tibia are observed in 36% and 61% of cases of venereal and endemic syphilis, respectively. The authors argue that:

Fig. 9. Cross-sections of tibiae.
(Rissech et al. 2011)
the observed lesions of the tibia in the skeleton from Gava, characterized by encroachment into the medullary cavity of coarse cancellous bone, cancellization of the cortex, thickening of the diaphysis, the presence of small raised plaques of new bone bridging over minor blood vessels, a sabre-shaped morphology and a predominance of bone remodeling rather than periosteal reaction, are the typical characteristics of tibiae affected by treponematosis (Rissech et al. 2011, p. 10).These bones from Roman-period Spain join other pre-Columbian evidence for treponemal disease, including data from the 6th-3rd c BC Greek colony of Metaponto, Italy (Henneberg & Henneberg 1994), from Roman (1st-4th c AD) Gloucester, England (Simmonds et al. 2008), and from Late Antique (4th c AD) France (Palfi et al. 1992).

It's not news that Romans had venereal diseases (as the very word comes from the name of the Roman goddess of love) like gonorrhea, but the evidence for venereal syphilis prior to the Medieval period in Europe is sparse at the moment. Still, with perhaps 10,000 skeletons from Imperial Rome having been excavated in recent years and only cursorily studied, it is highly likely that palaeopathologists will soon begin to uncover more skeletal lesions and diagnose more diseases. And although the Romans didn't understand germ theory, the medical treatises of Galen, for example, are of immense help in our understanding of the epidemiology and presentation of a variety of diseases that afflicted the Romans.

So did the Romans have syphilis? The jury's still out, but I'm guessing there will be enough evidence soon for someone to add "insanity resulting from neurosyphilis" to the list of crazy theories for why the Roman Empire fell.

References:

M. Henneberg & R.J. Henneberg. 1994. Treponematosis in ancient Greek colony of Metaponto, Southern Italy, 580-250 BCE. In L'origine de la syphilis en Europe, avant ou apres 1493?, O. Dutour et al. eds., pp. 92-98. Editions Errance.

... Read more »

Pàlfi, G., Dutour, O., Borreani, M., Brun, J., & Berato, J. (1992) Pre-Columbian congenital syphilis from the late antiquity in France. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 2(3), 245-261. DOI: 10.1002/oa.1390020309

C. Rissech, C. Roberts, X. Tomas-Batlle, X. Tomas-Gimeno, B. Fuller, P.L. Fernandez, & M. Botella. (2011) A Roman Skeleton with Possible Treponematosis in the North-East of the Iberian Peninsula: a Morphological and Radiological Study. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. info:/

October 11, 2011
09:30 AM
618 views

Mapping Parasites in Ancient Italy

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

Last week, Dr. Bethany Turner of Georgia State University gave a talk at Vanderbilt called, “Diet versus locale: isotopic support for causal influences in pathological conditions at Machu Picchu, Peru.” Bethany’s work centers on analysis of skeletal remains for multiple isotopes – Sr, O, Pb, C, and N – to investigate the heterogeneity of the population, which was composed of slaves, short-term (non-local) laborers, and locals. I greatly enjoyed the talk because, even though Machu Picchu is far removed in time and place, Bethany and I are using similar methods to answer similar questions about physical mobility in the past. Imperial Rome also, of course, had millions of slaves, as well as free immigrants who came looking for work and locals who were born there.

One of Bethany’s research questions was whether the immigrants were less healthy than the locals. In my dissertation research (Killgrove 2010), I investigated the frequencies of common diseases – osteoarthritis, dental caries, abscesses, linear enamel hypoplasias, and porotic hyperostosis – and found that immigrants to Rome were not significantly less healthy than locals, although they did seem to die at an earlier age (possibly of new diseases they were not immune to, possibly because the immigrant population had a different demographic profile than the locals did). Bethany took a slightly different approach to this question: she looked at porotic hyperostosis, which is a bony reaction to anemia that develops in childhood, and found that it was significantly correlated with oxygen isotopes.

Backing up a bit, anemia has many causes, but it often results from diet or from parasites, although it can also be the result of a genetic condition (such as sickle-cell anemia or thalassemia). If a person eats too much maize, for example, that individual is at greater risk of developing a dietary anemia because maize is low in iron. This also holds for millet, which is much lower in iron than its C3 cousins, wheat and barley. So people with high carbon isotope values indicative of C4 (maize/millet) consumption may be expected to have higher frequencies of porotic hyperostosis if diet was the primary contributing factor to anemia. But people who grew up in an area without clean water, particularly an area with a large parasite load like hookworms, may also be at great risk of developing anemia when the parasite attaches to the intestinal lining and robs its host of needed nutrients like iron.

To distinguish between dietary and parasitic anemias as a cause of porotic hyperostosis, Bethany graphed her Machu Picchu individuals on a carbon/oxygen scatterplot. She found two fairly distinct groups of people along the oxygen axis: those with porotic hyperostosis and those without. This clustering she interpreted along the lines of Blom et al. 2005, who argued that a latitudinal patterning of porotic hyperostosis along the coast of Peru and a tendency for childhood anemia to be present in populations from more humid environments may be related to high parasite loads in certain locations rather than to differences in diet. In fact, Bethany’s data did not vary much on the carbon axis, further suggesting a parasitic origin for anemia rather than a dietary one.

Since I have all the same data from my two Roman populations, I created a similar graph to see what patterns there were in the carbon, oxygen, and porotic hyperostosis data. In the scatterplot below, individuals with and without porotic hyperostosis are plotted, and the yellow box represents the “local” oxygen isotope range of Rome:

C and O isotope data from the first molars of two
Imperial Roman (1st-3rd c AD) populations

Unfortunately, my Roman data were not as clear-cut as Bethany’s Peruvian data. Except for the one individual who consumed a C4-heavy diet and suffered from porotic hyperostosis, the rest of the diseased individuals are distributed within -13 to -11 permil on the carbon axis, which represents the average Roman diet of mostly C3 resources like wheat and barley. The people with porotic hyperostosis are spread out on the oxygen axis; however, there are none with oxygen isotope values lower than that of Rome. You may recall from older blog posts (like this one) that oxygen isotope values are more negative in cool, dry climates and more positive in hot, humid climates. It’s actually not a surprise, then, that the non-local people with porotic hyperostosis are on the right side of the graph: they were likely from places warmer and more humid than Rome, which means places along the sea and to the south – places that historically had more malaria, for example, than even Rome did. There are few data points on the left side of the graph, but again, I would expect there to be less malaria and fewer parasites in general in cooler, drier climates like the Apennines that were the source of freshwater springs.

This Roman sample size is small, and the data are not perfectly correlated. A simple t-test, though, actually indicated a statistically significant difference between the oxygen isotope means of the group with porotic hyperostosis and the group without it (t=3.06, p<.005), so with more data, I may find a more robust result. Graphing carbon versus oxygen isotope data has been done for years, but I’d never thought to add porotic hyperostosis as a variable until I heard Bethany’s wonderful talk. This technique has great potential for investigating parasitic disease in ancient Italy, and additional bioarchaeological research - specifically, isotopic analysis - on this front could yield a much stronger argument for the disease ecology of malaria and other parasitic diseases in the peninsula, adding a new dimension to previous osteological studies (e.g., Facchini et al. 2004).

References:

Blom, D., Buikstra, J., Keng, L., Tomczak, P., Shoreman, E., & Stevens-Tuttle, D. (2005). Anemia and childhood mortality: Latitudinal patterning along the coast of pre-Columbian Peru American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 127 (2), 152-169 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.10431

Facchini, F., Rastelli, E., & Brasili, P. (2004). Cribra orbitalia and cribra cranii in Roman skeletal remains from the Ravenna area and Rimini(I–IV century AD) International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 14 (2), 126-136 DOI: 10.1002/oa.717

Killgrove, K. 2010. Migration and mobility in Imperial Rome. PhD dissertation, UNC Chapel Hill. [PDF]

... Read more »

Blom, D., Buikstra, J., Keng, L., Tomczak, P., Shoreman, E., & Stevens-Tuttle, D. (2005) Anemia and childhood mortality: Latitudinal patterning along the coast of pre-Columbian Peru. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 127(2), 152-169. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.10431

Facchini, F., Rastelli, E., & Brasili, P. (2004) Cribra orbitalia and cribra cranii in Roman skeletal remains from the Ravenna area and Rimini(I–IV century AD). International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 14(2), 126-136. DOI: 10.1002/oa.717

Turner, B., Kamenov, G., Kingston, J., & Armelagos, G. (2009) Insights into immigration and social class at Machu Picchu, Peru based on oxygen, strontium, and lead isotopic analysis. Journal of Archaeological Science, 36(2), 317-332. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2008.09.018

October 4, 2011
09:45 PM
607 views

The Millet-Eaters of the Roman Empire

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

Just a few days ago, only the second isotope study of millet consumption in the Roman Empire was published, by Pollard and colleagues in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. In a small Romano-British cemetery in Kent (late 3rd-early 4th century AD), a salvage archaeology project uncovered a dozen burials that were simple in nature: only coffin nails and hobnails from boots were found in most graves. Among these simple farmers, though, was an individual with a surprisingly high carbon isotope value, so Pollard and colleagues undertook a dietary (C/N) and migration (Sr/O) study of the individuals.

The anomalous partially complete skeleton was that of a male over the age of 45 buried wearing hobnail boots. The individual's nitrogen isotope ratio was a bit high (11.2 permil), indicating aquatic resource consumption, but was not higher than average for Roman Britain. His carbon isotope ratio from collagen, however, came in at -15.2 permil, in stark comparison to the average of the other individuals of -19.8 permil (see below). This difference may not seem dramatic until you factor in the standard deviation - variation within the d13C ratios of the others from the site was only 0.3! This person was therefore eating a whole bunch of C4 resources - millet, sorghum, or animals foddered on those grains.

Figure 3 from Pollard et al. showing the anomalous individual (SK12671)
compared with other Romano-British sites and the two anomalous individuals
published in Muldner et al. 2011.

Evidence of C4 plant consumption is surprisingly absent from the archaeological record of the Roman world, even though authors like Pliny note that millet and beans were frequently eaten together by people in rural Italy. As far as I know, only one bioarchaeological study has been done on skeletons from Italy looking at C4 resource use (Tafuri et al. 2009). Researchers found evidence of millet consumption in the elevated d13C ratios of people from northern Italy in the Bronze Age compared with people in southern Italy. Another Romano-British cemetery yielded two individuals with a mixed C3-C4 diet, where carbon isotope values ranged from -16.8 permil to -15.8 permil. So this new person from Kent provides the highest d13C ratio obtained so far from bone collagen in the Roman period. Below is a graph of the Bronze Age millet-eaters and the Romano-British people from Pollard and colleagues' study:

Figure 4 from Pollard et al. 2011 comparing Romano-British
samples with Bronze Age north Italian samples

Curiously, Pollard and colleagues didn't look at carbon values from bone apatite, but they did look at the carbon isotope ratio of the dental apatite, which in this individual was -7.2 permil, also significantly higher than the values from the others, which range from -13.8 to -11.5 permil. This likely means that his C4 resource use was in the form of direct consumption of millet rather than from consuming protein from animals that were foddered on millet.
Finally, they investigated the individual's strontium and oxygen isotope ratios to see if he perhaps immigrated to Britain from an area with more evidence of millet production and consumption, like Italy. This is where the paper gets interesting - the strontium ratio is .708826 and the oxygen (from carbonate) is 26.1 permil. These values are within the range of expectation for someone from southern Britain, so the authors could not rule out a local origin for the man. However, my dissertation work (Killgrove 2010) showed that those values are equally likely to occur in or near Rome - my local strontium range for Rome is .7079-.7102, and the local oxygen range (drawn from Prowse et al. 2007) is 24.9-27.1 permil. Pollard and colleagues suggest that this man may have come from northern Italy, where growing millet was common, but I am not convinced because his strontium isotope ratio of .7088 is far too low for the older geology of northern Italy, unless he was located near the east coast (and then his oxygen ratio should be lower). Rome itself is around .7090, and .7088 - if we assume a western Italian origin - is more like Naples. Granted, it is extraordinarily difficult to pinpoint homeland, and part of this article addresses the problems with identifying immigrants through just Sr and O isotope analyses. As I have started to write up my Sr/O study for publication, it's something I'm keeping in mind. Interestingly, the authors suggest that the inclusion of hobnailed boots in this man's burial may signify that he was "walking back" from Britain to his true homeland.
But the publication of this article - in AJPA no less - makes me excited because I'm sending off my C/N isotope article tomorrow to the Journal of Archaeological Science. And in that article, I have a section on individual ET20, a male in his 30s from the site of Castellaccio Europarco, in the Roman suburbs. ET20 has an astoundingly high d13C ratio: -12.5 permil. This is on par with the isotope ratio of millet itself, and carbon ratios this high tend only to be found in populations that ate maize (corn). However, the d13C ratio from ET20's bone apatite is only -8.6 permil, which is not dramatically higher than the rest of the population, suggesting that this individual was consuming his C4 resources in the form of animals who were foddered on millet. His d15N ratio is 8.3 permil, which is a bit lower than expected from the population, so perhaps he was eating beans along with his millet or millet-fed animals like Pliny suggests. I did do Sr/O on this individual, and they came back at .709631 and 25.3 permil, respectively. Both of these are within my admittedly broad "local" range of Rome, but no one else among the locals has such a high d13C ratio. I suggest in my dissertation (Killgrove 2010) that he may have come from northern Italy - the strontium ratio is higher than expected from Rome, indicating a childhood spent on slightly older geology. I also found with ET20 that his d13C ratio from enamel apatite was -4.0 permil - so he changed his diet between the time he was born and the time he died at Rome. Here's a quick graph from the forthcoming paper showing just how far to the right (C4 use) ET20 is in comparison with others from Castellaccio and Casal Bertone (compare with the graphs above, where no one reaches the high carbon value that ET20 does):

From Killgrove & Tykot, n.d.

At any rate, the person that Pollard and colleagues found (and the two people found by Muldner et al. 2011) show that we have a lot left to learn about C4 resource use in the Roman Empire. Millet may have been considered a substandard grain by many authors, the kind of food that rural or poor people eat, but there is growing evidence that many people were consuming at least a C3-C4 mixed diet and several people were eating quite a bit of millet or animals foddered on the grain. Isotopes are letting us tease out differences in diet at the levels of the individual and the population - especially in Rome, as I've blogged about before here. Although the overall diet mostly tracks with historical and artistic records from the Roman world, the diversity in the lower-class diet is surprising and intriguing, and I think will eventually be able to tell us more about things like status. Watch this space for more on the diet of my Romans as I work through the process of submitting and revising my C/N isotope article this week!

References:

Killgrove, K. (2010). Migration and mobility in Imperial Rome. PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Cha... Read more »

Muldner, G, Chenery, C, & Eckardt, H. (2011) The "headless Romans": multi-isotope investigations of an unusual burial ground from Roman Britain. Journal of Archaeological Science, 280-290. info:/

Pollard AM, Ditchfield P, McCullagh JS, Allen TG, Gibson M, Boston C, Clough S, Marquez-Grant N, & Nicholson RA. (2011) "These boots were made for walking": The isotopic analysis of a C(4) Roman inhumation from Gravesend, Kent, UK. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. PMID: 21959970

Prowse TL, Schwarcz HP, Garnsey P, Knyf M, Macchiarelli R, & Bondioli L. (2007) Isotopic evidence for age-related immigration to imperial Rome. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 132(4), 510-9. PMID: 17205550

Tafuri MA, Craig OE, & Canci A. (2009) Stable isotope evidence for the consumption of millet and other plants in Bronze Age Italy. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 139(2), 146-53. PMID: 19051259

September 19, 2011
04:40 PM
533 views

Archaeology of the Undead

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

Lots of press has been given in the past week to two late 7th to early 9th century burials found at the site of Kilteasheen in Ireland. According to the news reports and the documentary (which won't air in the U.S. until 2012, but which you can see on YouTube... for now), archaeologists excavating at the site from 2005-2009 uncovered over 130 graves. Two of them - both males - were buried with stones in their mouths, and one of the men also had a large stone on top of his torso. Aside from a 2008 report of a 4,000-year-old burial, these two early 8th century Irish burials seem to be the oldest evidence of what may be the practice of preventing "revenants" (zombies, vampires, and other undead people) from returning to the land of the living.

8th century male burial from Kilteasheen, Ireland,
with large stone on and under torso
(screencap from documentary)
Both Dorothy King (PhDiva) and Michelle Ziegler (Contagions) have already blogged about this. Dorothy points out some of the other evidence for "vampire" burials in Europe, such as the 10th-11th century cemetery of Celakovice near Prague that held a dozen people who were buried oddly (as with rocks in their mouths) and the so-called Vampire of Venice, a 60-year-old woman from a 1576 plague cemetery in Italy, who was buried with a large rock in her mouth (Nuzzolese and Borrini 2010).
The tradition of weighting down or otherwise defiling corpses (as with nails through the temple and stakes through the heart) seems to be a long one in Europe, born out of a fear of the dead that was related to the rise of Christianity, the lack of understanding of germ theory, and the increase in epidemic diseases.
There weren't, for example, vampires in Rome. The Romans actually had ongoing relationships with the dead, running pipes from the ground to the grave below in order to offer them food and drink and celebrating them at least once a year in the Parentalia. The Judeo-Christian idea that the dead should go into the ground and stay there means that deviations from this practice - as hair and nails seemed to grow after death, for example - probably caused a lot of general freaking out. But the simple introduction of monotheism may also have caused cultural stress, particularly in 7th century England, when kings were converting to Christianity and people were no longer sure what to believe.
Michelle points out that Ireland suffered through two major epidemics of bubonic plague, in 664 and 683, followed by a massive famine in 700. Based on the C14 dates reported in the documentary, it's possible these two burials date as early as the late 7th century. Rocks in or on the body of the deceased may have been meant to pin the person into the grave to prevent that person from rising or coming back, or may have been placed there because the mouth was where the soul escaped from. But rocks may also have been important in the mitigation of disease. Many of the archaeological examples of skeletons with mouth-rocks are assumed to have come from plague cemeteries. Some of the symptoms of bubonic plague are delirium, heavy breathing, and continuous blood-vomiting. People knew that plague could spread but didn't understand how, so blocking a person's mouth may have been an attempt to prevent the spread of the disease. The sight of a terminally ill person coughing up blood could even have been the catalyst for the invention of vampires, as a cultural explanation for disease before the advent of germ theory.

The Kilteasheen burials are likely too late to be plague-related, but even a small urban center could have had endemic tuberculosis, which causes some similar symptoms, like bloody sputum. I don't think a disease-based explanation can be completely ruled out for these burials.

8th century burial of a male, Kilteasheen, Ireland,
with stone in the mouth
(credit: Chris Read, found at MSNBC.com)
In sum, we can't be certain of the meaning of these Irish burials, but the long tradition of incapacitating the dead to prevent them from becoming revenants coupled with historical records of disease epidemics suggests the people who buried these men likely had a good reason for wanting them to stay dead.
Excavators at Kilteasheen estimate that there are around 3,000 burials at the site, so I suspect we'll be hearing more about this cemetery in the years to come. It will be interesting in particular to see if other burials in the cemetery were given the same mouth-rock treatment and whether the practice dates only to the 8th century or continues to later periods of the cemetery's use.

Watch the documentary, Mysteries of the Vampire Skeletons, on YouTube:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Further Reading and References:

McLeod, J. 2010. Vampires, a Bite-Sized History. Pier 9. [Google Books]

Nuzzolese E, & Borrini M. 2010. Forensic approach to an archaeological casework of "vampire" skeletal remains in Venice: odontological and anthropological prospectus. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 55 (6), 1634-7. PMID: 20707834.

Rickels, L. 1999. The Vampire Lectures. University of Minnesota Press. [Google Books]

Tsaliki, A. 2001. Vampires beyond legend - a bioarchaeological approach. In Proceedings of the XIII European Meeting of the Paleopathology Association, ed. M. La Verghetta and L. Capasso, pp. 295-300. [Read here]

Tsaliki, A. 2008.... Read more »

Nuzzolese E, & Borrini M. (2010) Forensic approach to an archaeological casework of "vampire" skeletal remains in Venice: odontological and anthropological prospectus. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 55(6), 1634-7. PMID: 20707834

September 15, 2011
10:59 AM
662 views

Foreign Women in Imperial Rome: the Isotopic Evidence

by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons

Just a short time ago, I had a paper at the European Association of Archaeologists meeting in Oslo. I unfortunately couldn't attend the conference, so Rob Tykot presented it. The paper was fun to write, though, and lays out the bioarchaeological evidence (albeit sparse at the moment) for women who immigrated to Imperial Rome. Following is the complete presentation. Comments are always welcome!

Foreign women in Imperial Rome: the isotopic evidence
K. Killgrove, Vanderbilt UniversityR. Tykot, University of South FloridaJ. Montgomery, Durham University
A significant amount of classical scholarship over the years has been dedicated to understanding the demographic make-up of the population of Imperial Rome. Without a proper census, however, classical demographers lack several key pieces of information necessary for reconstructing the number of citizens, slaves, and foreigners at Rome (Noy 2000:16).
Tombstones provide the most solid evidence of immigrants who died in Rome. Here we have an example of the inscription on a tombstone of a soldier, noting he was from Noricum (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum vi 3225, translated in Noy 2011). For the most part, though, the epigraphic habit was largely the province of the wealthy, educated elite, leaving us with little information about the lower classes. Demographic estimates of foreigners at Rome range from 5% to 35%, suggesting that as many as one out of every three people in Rome arrived there from elsewhere. Below is the inscription from a large tomb that a group of free slaves built in Rome (Année Epigraphique 1972, 14, translated in Noy 2011).  They all appear to have belonged to the same household (as they share a name and the designation C.L., “freed slave of Gaius”) yet came to Rome from various places: Greece, Asia Minor, and north Africa. The practice of commemorating one’s homeland is rare, though, and it is unclear how many slaves and free immigrants came from Italy or from further afield in the Empire (Morley 1996, p. 39).  Finally, the epigraphical record of immigrants to Rome is gender-biased, as the vast majority of inscriptions that mention immigrants are those of males (Noy 2000, p. 60). Part of this bias is attributable to the commemoration of soldiers, but males outnumber females three to one even in civilian immigrant inscriptions (Noy 2000, p. 61, Table 2).
In order to learn more about female immigrants to the Imperial capital, we undertook a bioarchaeological study of human skeletal remains from Rome. Through a combination of isotope analyses, palaeopathology, and burial style, we identified previously unknown female immigrants in the archaeological record of Rome and were able to reconstruct key aspects of their life histories.
Our skeletal material comes from the cemetery of Casal Bertone, which was located just 2 km from the center of Rome and was in use from the 2nd-3rd centuries AD (Musco et al. 2008). The majority of the graves were located within a simple necropolis, which included unmarked pit burials as well as burials a cappuccina. An above-ground mausoleum that slightly postdates the necropolis was found as well, and it may have held people of higher social status. Out of the 138 burials, we chose a stratified sample of 30 adults to subject to strontium, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen isotope analyses – 19 males and 11 females.
This graph shows the strontium and oxygen isotope results for the first molars of adults from Casal Bertone. The approximate isotope range of Rome is represented by a box comprising the upper and lower bounds of expected Sr and O values. No other Sr studies in the Italian peninsula have been done on human skeletal remains, so the local range was estimated conservatively using geochemical modeling that took into account the fact that Rome was supplied by aqueducts that drew water from sources with distinctly different geology than is found in the volcanic Alban Hills (Killgrove 2010a, 2010b).  By combining Sr with an O range from previously published human skeletal data (Prowse et al. 2007), however, it is easier to see nonlocals. Here, females T82A and T39 are fairly clearly immigrants to Rome because of low/high O isotopes and rather low Sr. T42, on the other hand, is a borderline case since measurement error could put her within the local O range for Rome. Clearly, though, isotope analysis of human skeletal remains is a viable way to identify female immigrants in the bioarchaeological record of Rome, particularly those who were not commemorated as such on tombstones.
Three of the 11 females we tested (27%) were probably immigrants to Rome. Out of the 19 males studied, 6 were immigrants (32%). More interesting, though, is the sex ratio in the immigrant population. Whereas the sex ratio in tombstones that commemorate immigrants at Rome is 78% male versus 22% female, the ratio of immigrants discovered through skeletal evidence is 66% male versus 33% female. This is, granted, a small sample but suggests that the bias towards male immigrants may in the future be rectified by studying skeletal data.
Epigraphy does occasionally tell us a little about the lives of female immigrants. The tombstone of freedwoman Valeria Lycisca, for example, specifically notes that she came to Rome at age 12 (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum vi 28228).  Isotope analysis of the skeleton can give us similar information, in that it can help narrow the window of time in which a person immigrated. Two of the Casal Bertone female immigrants – T39 and T82A – also had third molars that could be subjected to Sr isotope analysis. Both produced M3 Sr values that were very close to their M1 values. The difference between T39’s first and third molars is .00016, and the difference between T82A’s first and third molars is .00017. Their M3 values still place them towards the low end of the calculated Sr range of Rome. People in the low end were probably immigrants from an area with younger geology (such as the southern, volcanic areas of Italy); however, it is possible people in this range were locals who consumed a significant amount of Roman aqueduct water (roughly 90% of all water consumed) throughout childhood. Oxygen isotope analysis on the M3s has not yet been done. Based on the small differences between these women’s M1s and M3s, it is likely that both immigrated to Rome after the development of their M3s was complete. Therefore, T39, a woman of about 15-17 years at the time of her death, likely died shortly after arrival in Rome.
... Read more »

K. Killgrove. (2010) Identifying immigrants to Imperial Rome using strontium isotope analysis. Journal of Roman Archaeology. info:/

Prowse TL, Schwarcz HP, Garnsey P, Knyf M, Macchiarelli R, & Bondioli L. (2007) Isotopic evidence for age-related immigration to imperial Rome. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 132(4), 510-9. PMID: 17205550

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