The Roman period, like all pre-modern times, was a time when physical activity was a much more important aspect of everyday life. Even the affluent will have spent more time walking, while being transported on horseback or in carriages is more physically taxing than being moved around in cars. WTiile this brought its own risks in terms of accidents, it also meant that basic levels of fitness and tolerance of hard work were far higher than today. This is reflected in the low incidence -r of osteoporosis, where bones, usually in older women, become brittle and fragile. Osteoporosis is associated with a lack of exercise and deficiencies in calcium and protein. In our own time, the condition has become common for obvious reasons.
During the Roman period, there was a significant increase in dental caries. Whereas one in 33 of the Iron Age population had been affected, in the Roman period it rose to as high as one in eight amongst women.® The increase, along with a slight increase in dental abscesses, is attributable to sugars in cereal crops that were being consumed in larger quantities. The evidence for diet suggests that the population had access to enough iron to prevent anaemia under normal circumstances. The fact that anaemia had affected around a quarter of the adults, and more than a third of the juveniles, at the Poundbury cemetery at Dorchester requires another explanation than iron deficiency. The most likely cause is infectious disease, conditions of the digestive tract, or high lead levels, though of course the latter may have been as a result of very local conditions. Infection can cause damage to the bone, and this is found in more Romano-British skeletons than in those of Iron Age date. An almost unlimited range of bacteria and viruses can cause infection. to mutation and natural selection, many ancient varieties will no longer exist, complicating our interpretation of disease and infection. It is usually impossible to know which bacteria or viruses had been responsible, even if they were detectable. Nevertheless, bone damage associated with specific diseases suggests that tuberculosis and leprosy were certainly introduced during the Roman period. However, most cases of tuberculosis do not lead to skeletal damage, and therefore would be archaeologically invisible. In other instances, sinusitis, caused by a nasal infection, is easily identifiable from damage to the nasal bones.
Poliomyelitis in Roman Britain could have resulted from improved civic water supplies and hygiene. The explosive growth in poliomyelitis infections in the USA in the early twentieth century is largely attributed to the growth of hygiene and decline of breast-feeding, reducing infant exposure to the endemic disease. Previously, children benefited from ingesting antibodies from their mothers through breast-milk. By failing to develop immunity in protected conditions, children grew up susceptible to infection. This led to polio’s perverse appearance in epidemic form in civilized, hygienic communities. Polio has been identified in a handful of Romano-British skeletons, including, interestingly, four from Cirencester, though even here this was only regarded as the most likely explanation rather than a certain diagnosis.’ But whether this represents an endemic disease, as polio usually was in antiquity, or a local epidemic caused by reduced resistance as a result of improved hygiene, illustrates perfectly how difficult it is for us even to make educated guesses about what happened in any one place or time.
Romano-British men seem to have been taller than their prehistoric predecessors, reaching an average 1.7 m (5 ft 6 in), though women dropped a little to an average of 1.6 m (5 ft 3 in). However, most of the Roman evidence comes from urban cemeteries, which sometimes had disproportionately large numbers of men, who probably benefited from a more predictable and better diet than their earlier counterparts. Moreover, such figures are derived from so small a sample of the total population that there is little chance they are reliably representative.
Being well fed was not necessarily an advantage. Gout, caused by rich food, first appears in Britain in the Roman period, manifested in conditions of the big toe bones. If people were better nourished, fitter and more likely to have access to clean water and medical treatment of sorts, then they were liable to live longer and therefore be exposed to more accidents and general wear and tear. This may be the reason why
Romano-British skeletons have high levels of injury and joint disease, with as many as 14 per cent having the latter. When it comes to evidence for injury, 14 per cent of the adult skeletons in which sex could be determined (a total of 505 out of 3,620) showed signs of bone trauma. Not only is it impossible to know how common this was, it is also impossible to know whether the trauma was the result of a casual accident, a work-related accident, or due to violence of any kind. Even when damage to bones seem to have been caused by weapons, this could just as easily have been the result of a tavern brawl as of warfare.
World History
