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381 Pages
The Routledge Handbook of Diet and Nutrition in the Roman World presents a comprehensive overview of the sources, issues and methodologies involved in the study of the Roman diet. The focus of the book is on the Mediterranean heartland from the second century BC to the third and fourth centuries AD.
Life is impossible without food, but what people eat is not determined by biology alone, and this makes it a vital subject of social and historical study. The Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach in which all kinds of sources and disciplines are combined to study the diet and nutrition of men, women and children in city and countryside in the Roman world. The chapters in this book are structured in five parts. Part I introduces the reader to the wide range of textual, material and bioarchaeological evidence concerning food and nutrition. Part offers an overview of various kinds of food and drink, including cereals, pulses, olive oil, meat and fish, and the social setting of their consumption. Part III goes beyond the perspective of the Roman adult male by concentrating on women and children, on the cultures of Roman Egypt and Central Europe, as well as the Jews in Palestine and the impact of Christianity. Part IV provides a forum to three scholars to offer their thoughts on what physical anthropology contributes to our understanding of health, diet and (mal)nutrition. The final section puts food supply and its failure in the context of community and empire.
Paul Erdkamp is Professor of Ancient History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. His research interests focus on the demography and economy of the Roman world, including living standards and food supply. In addition he has published on Republican historiography and Roman warfare. He is author of Hunger and the Sword. Warfare and Food Supply in Roman Republican Wars (1998) and The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (2005) and edited A Companion to the Roman Army (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome (2013) and, with Koen Verboven and Arjan Zuiderhoek, Ownership and Exploitation of Land and Natural Resources in the Roman World (2015).
Claire Holleran is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests focus on Roman social and economic history, particularly the city of Rome, urban economies, the retail trade and demography. She is the author of Shopping in Ancient Rome: The Retail Trade in the Late Republic and the Principate (2012), and co-editor with April Pudsey of Demography and the Greco-Roman World (2011), and with Amanda Claridge of A Companion to the City of Rome (2018).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
L.M. Banducci is an Assistant Professor of Greek and Roman Studies at Carleton University, Canada. Her research centres on the archaeology of pre-Roman and Roman Italy, particularly with regards to foodways, domestic technology, and material economy. She specializes in artefact analysis: examining how everyday objects were made, used, and re-purposed. Her current research includes studying the petrology of Roman cooking vessels, and 3D scanning serving vessels from the Capitoline Museums as part of the Capturing the Life Cycle of Ceramics in Rome project. She also serves as the Director of Finds at the excavations of the city of Gabii, overseeing the study and publication of the artefacts from this vast site.
Kim Beerden is a Lecturer in Ancient History at Leiden University. Her research explores the history of ancient mentalities, especially the topic of religious dealings with uncertainty. She is the author of a comparative study on ancient divination titled Worlds Full of Signs: Ancient Greek Divination in Context (Brill, 2013) but has also published in the field of food and foodways and is currently interested in notions of fat and fattening.
Chryssi Bourbou is a Bioarchaeologist at the Ephorate of Antiquities at Chania (Hellenic Ministry of Culture). She currently holds a senior postdoctoral position at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), investigating aspects of Roman childhood and weaning patterns. She is the author of various scientific papers and monographs, such as Health and Disease in Byzantine Crete (7"—12" centuries AD) (Ashgate, 2010) and co-editor (with L. Schepartz and S. Fox) of the volume New Directions in the Skeletal Biology of Greece (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2009). Her main research interests include the bioarchaeological analysis of Greek populations, with special emphasis on non-adults, and the application of stable isotope analysis for detecting dietary and weaning patterns.
Wim Broekaert was a postdoctoral researcher in Ancient History at Ghent University. He has published widely on many aspects of Roman trade. He published Navicularii et negotiantes, a prosopographical study of Roman merchants and shippers, in 2013.
Willy Clarysse is emeritus professor of Greek and Ancient History at the KULeuven and a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium. His research is focused on the multicultural and multilingual society of Greco-Roman Egypt, with a special interest for onomastics and prosopography. He is the editor of Greek and demotic papyri, including Les ostraca grecs d’Elkab (1990) and Counting the People in Hellenistic Egypt (with DJ. Thompson; Cambridge University Press 2006) and the editor of the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) online.
John Donahue is Professor of Classical Studies at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. His books, articles and reviews focus on Latin epigraphy and Roman social history, especially ancient health, diet and dining practices. His most recent book is entitled, Food and Drink in Antiquity: A Sourcebook of Readings from the Greco-Roman World (2015).
Paul Erdkamp is Professor of Ancient History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research interest focus on the demography and economy of the Roman world, including living standards and food supply. In addition he has published on Republican historiography and Roman warfare. He is author of Hunger and the Sword. Warfare and Food Supply in Roman Republican Wars (Brill 1998) and The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press 2005) and edited the Blackwell Companion to the Roman Army (Wiley-Blackwell 2007), Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press 2013) and, with Koen Verboven and Ayjan Zuiderhoek, Ownership and Exploitation of Land and Natural Resources in the Roman World (Oxford University Press 2015).
Miko Flohr is Lecturer in Ancient History at Leiden University. His research focuses on the material remains of cities in Roman Italy, and takes a particular interest in the history of everyday economic life in urban shops and workshops. He authored The World of the Fullo: Work, Economy and Society in Roman Italy (Oxford University Press, 2013), and co-edited, with Andrew Wilson, Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and The Economy of Pompeii (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Paul Halstead is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. His research explores farming, food and society in late prehistoric—early historic Greece, drawing especially on zooarchaeological analysis of animal remains and on ethnographic study of ‘traditional’ rural economies in the Mediterranean. The latter is the focus of his Two Oxen Ahead: Pre-Mechanized Farming in the Mediterranean (Wiley Blackwell, 2014).
Annette M. Hansen (MSc) studied Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology (BA, 2010) and Arabic Studies (BA, 2010) at Bryn Mawr College and obtained an MSc in Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford (Keble College, 2012). She is currently completing her PhD project: The Agricultural Economy of Islamic Jordan, from the Arab Conquest until the Early Ottoman Period through an NWO Sustainable Humanities fellowship. In addition, she is senior archaeobotanist at archaeological projects in Jordan and Israel. Hansen’s main interests are the agricultural and food economies of the Near East from the Late Roman to Islamic periods. She uses an interdisciplinary approach in her research, integrating evidence from (ethno-)archaeobotany, Arabic written sources and economic history.
F.B.J. (Frits) Heinrich (MA, MSc) studied History (BA, 2009) and Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology (BA, 2010, Research MA, 2011) at the University of Groningen and obtained an MSc in Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford (Brasenose College, 2012). He is currently completing his PhD. In 2017 he was also an Adam Smith Fellow in Political Economy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. In addition, he is senior archaeobotanist at archaeological projects in Egypt and Sudan. His main interests are the Roman agricultural economy and premodern agricultural economics, topics which he primarily approaches through (ethno-)archaeobotany, biochemistry, economics and papyrology.
Claire Holleran is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. Her research interests focus on Roman social and economic history, particularly the city of Rome, urban economies, the retail trade and demography. She is the author of Shopping in Ancient Rome; the Retail Trade in the Late Republic and the Principate (Oxford University Press, 2012), and co-editor with April Pudsey of Demography and the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and with Amanda Claridge of A Companion to the City of Rome (WileyBlackwell, 2018).
Ttinde Kaszab-Olschewski is an Archaeologist and Lecturer in Archeology of the Roman Provinces at the University of Cologne. Her research interests focus on Roman civil life in the provinces, particularly the rural and small settlements with agricultural and craftsman production. She is the author of Siedlungsgenese im Bereich des Hambacher Forstes (Archaeopress, 2006), co-editor and author with Jutta Meurers-Balke of Grenzenlose Gaumenfreuden. Rémische Kiiche in einer germanischen Provinz (Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2010), and with Ingrid Tamer of Wald- und Holznutzung in der rémischen Antike (DGUF-Verlag 2017).
Kristina Killgrove is Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina. She earned degrees in both Anthropology (PhD) and Classical Archaeology (MA) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests focus on bioarchaeology in the Roman world, including ways to reconstruct diet, disease and migration from human skeletal remains. Her current research is based at the sites of Gabii and Oplontis. She is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, and she writes about archaeology, anthropology, and classics for the general public at Forbes and Mental Floss.
David Kraemer is Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary He has published eight books on topics as varied as Rabbinic understandings of human suffering, beliefs concerning death and the afterlife in Rabbinic Judaism, and the Jewish family. His publications include Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages (2007).
Educated at the University of Toronto, Geoffrey Kron teaches Greek history at the University of Victoria (Canada). His research focuses on Greco-Roman social and economic history, including agriculture, particularly animal husbandry, social equality and living standards, including nutrition, housing, and public health in the ancient world.
Christian Laes is Professor of Latin and Ancient History at the University of Antwerp and Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Manchester. He has published five monographs and more than 80 international contributions on the sociocultural history of Roman and Late Antiquity. Human life course (childhood, youth, sexuality, disabilities) has been one of the focuses of his research. The research for this chapter was carried out when he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Social Research, University of Tampere.
Alexandra Livarda is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics and Archaeology of the University of Nottingham (UK). Much of her work has focused on the archaeology of food and the social role of plants in Roman and medieval societies of Northwestern Europe. She has also worked extensively in the Aegean, where she has co-directed the excavation research project at the Bronze Age town of Palaikastro, Crete, and contributed as an archaeobotanist to several other projects. Her research interests also include ancient sensory studies, the archaeology of rituals and ancient trade networks.
Michael MacKinnon is Professor of Classics at the University of Winnipeg. He specializes in the exploration of the role of animals in Greek and Roman antiquity, with a concentration on the integration of the zooarchaeological, ancient textual and iconographic databases that provide evidence to this effect. As a zooarchaeologist, he has been involved in more than 60 different archaeological projects, chiefly in the Mediterranean region. He is the author of Production and Consumption of Animals in Roman Italy: Integrating the Zooarchaeological and Textual Evidence (2004: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement 54).
Annalisa Marzano is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Reading, and a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London. She has participated in a number of archaeological projects in Italy, Libya and Egypt and published widely on a range of topics related to the social and economic history of the Roman world. Her research is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological, documentary and literary sources. She is the author of Roman Villas in Central Italy: A Social and Economic History (2007) and Harvesting the Sea: The Exploitation of Marine Resource in the Roman Mediterranean (2013). She is also co-editor, with Guy Métraux, of The Roman Villa in the Mediterranean Basin: Late Republic to Late Antiquity (2018).
Shana D. O’Connell is a Lecturer in Classics at Howard University in Washington, DC. In 2015, she received her PhD in the History of Art from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include the depiction of still life, materiality and perspective in Campanian wall painting, and artistic technique and ornament as diachronic phenomena in ancient GrecoRoman art. She is also the specialist of painted plaster for the Huqoq Excavation Project in Israel.
Emmanuelle Raga is scientific collaborator at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her research focuses on the normative discourse about food in Western Late Antiquity as a heuristic tool for the understanding of the ‘Transformation of the Roman World’.
Erica Rowan is a lecturer in Classical Archaeology at Royal Holloway (UK). Her research focuses on ancient diet and consumption practices, the formation and evolution of ancient cultural identities, routes of connectivity and economic developments, particularly in Roman Italy. She has articles in the American Journal of Archaeology and Environmental Archaeology and she is currently working on a monograph, Food and Diet in Republican and Imperial Roman Italy (Bloomsbury) and co-editing a volume with Daniel King entitled Greek Diet and Medicine in the Roman World. She is the senior archaeobotanist on projects in Italy, Tunisia and Turkey, looking at material from the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity.
INTRODUCTION
Paul Erdkamp and Claire Holleran
Life is impossible without food, but what people eat is not determined by biology alone, and this makes it a vital subject of social and historical study. Food is as complex as society itself, as variations in diet reflect differences in gender and age, social and economic position, cultural and ideological attitudes, technical and agricultural know-how, and climatic and geographic background. What one eats is not a question of choice alone, but also of social conditioning and limited possibilities. At the same time, food is a means of expressing the place of oneself or another in society, and a symbol of one’s ideas and beliefs, which becomes even more complex if manners of preparation and consumption of food are taken into account, and with whom food and drink are enjoyed or not. Hence, it is not surprising that food and commensality are such popular areas of research in history, anthropology and other social studies. Rituals and ceremonies of festive meals, symbolic and metaphoric uses of food, religious and philosophic attitudes, and the material context of banquets are excellently discussed in recent publications, and these topics occur in this volume as well, but primarily when directly related to the nature and quality of the food and drink consumed in the Roman world. To be sure, diet and nutrition can only be understood in relation to their social, political, economic and cultural aspects, if only because the images emerging from our written and material sources are very much determined by them. As we have seen, food reflects the complexity of society itself, and hence we cannot discuss food without touching upon its social, cultural, economic and material contexts. However, this is not the main perspective of this book. In general, the aim of this book is to analyse the evidence for the nutrition of various segments of society, trying to offer as much nuance and differentiation as the imperfect sources for the Roman world allow.
The volume covers the entire Roman world, and while this includes those lands beyond the Mediterranean that were gradually subjected to Roman influence and political domination, the focus will be on the Mediterranean heartland. Much of the evidence derives from the late Republic and Principate, and hence, in practice the focus is on the period from the second century BC to the third century AD, but earlier and later times are discussed as well. Treating such a long period in thematic chapters might give the impression of a static approach, but it is clear that very much changed between mid-Republican Rome and the days of high empire, when previously unknown plants had been introduced in the Mediterranean world and central Europe and some exotic foodstuffs, such as pepper, became surprisingly widespread. One of the main questions of this volume is whether we also see a change in living standards and nutrition.
The introduction continues with, first, a brief overview of the past perspectives and debates in the literature on food in classical antiquity; second, a discussion of the need for multidisciplinarity due to the limitations of the various kinds of sources and related disciplines; third, a brief explanation of the structure of the book.
Ancient Food Studies
The history of food is a flourishing subject.' Numerous journals are devoted to food and foodways in historical perspective.” Regular conferences are dedicated to food history, such as the annual meetings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, the European Institute for Food Culture and History, the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) in North America, and the Asian Food Study Conference, as well as the biennial symposium of the International Committee for Research into European Food History. In 2013, the 82nd Anglo-American Conference of Historians in London reflected the zeitgeist by choosing Food in History as its conference theme. Landmark publications include The Oxford Companion to Food (1999), The Cambridge World History of Food (2000), and more recently, the ambitious six-volume Cultural History of Food (2012), spanning antiquity to the modern age. The Food Bibliography, a bibliographic database jointly compiled by the Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies and the European Institute for Food Culture and History currently contains some 20,880 records in eight different languages.* Dedicated research centres include Social and Cultural Food Studies (FOST) at the Vrije Univeristeit Brussel (Belgium), the Institut Européen de I’Histoire de l’Alimentation in Tours (France), the SOAS Food Studies Centre in London (UK), and the Centre for the History of Food and Drink at the University of Adelaide (Australia). There are also now numerous undergraduate and graduate programmes on food history in European and North American universities.*
Antiquity is at the forefront of this trend, although ancient food studies have a long history. Research goes back to at least the mid-nineteenth century, when studies were predictably antiquarian in their approach.> Soyer (1853), for example, drew primarily on literary evidence to compile a comprehensive catalogue of ancient foodstuffs. Food and dining was also very often a part of the “daily life’ works of the first half of the twentieth century, such as Friedlander (English trans. [1908]—1913) and Carcopino (1939; 1941). By the mid-twentieth century, more detailed studies of specific foodstuffs had also begun to appear, focusing in particular on the socalled ‘Mediterranean triad’ of grain, wine and olive oil, and especially on the staple of grain.° In the early 1960s, André (1961) was still relying principally on literary sources, albeit supplemented by pictorial evidence, mainly from Pompeii and other Campanian sites. By the end of that decade, however, Brothwell and Brothwell (1969) were making much greater use of archaeology, including zooarchaeology and archaeobotany, although they still relied chiefly on literature for their broad study of food in antiquity, particularly for the Graeco-Roman period.’
The basic listing or cataloguing of literary references to foodstuffs can, of course, only take us so far, not least because the identification of cereals, beans and plants mentioned in ancient literature with their modern counterparts is not always straightforward (André, 1985; Wilkins, 2012, 15).8 Moreover, the listing of foodstuffs tells us little about the frequency of consumption of particular foods, or their availability to the population as a whole, and inevitably leads to a focus on the elites. It tells us nothing about the nutritional value of food. It does not take account of taboos or religious or cultural restrictions that limit the access of certain population groups to specific foodstuffs. Nor does it include considerations of the role that food played in social relations and in the creation and preservation of particular identities. In short, while it might tell us something about Roman food, it says little about Roman diet. In fact, the study of foodstuffs and the study of diet and nutrition may overlap and intersect, but they are by no means synonymous (Rowan, 2014b, 1.3.2).
White’s (1976) article on food requirements and food supplies in classical times was one of the first studies to consider ancient food as it related to diet and nutrition more fully. While his analysis is still heavily dependent on ancient literature, he makes use of archaeological material, which he divides into four categories: the remains of food and food debris; skeletal remains and teeth; surviving artefacts; and painted or sculpted representations of food-related activities (White, 1976, 145). The focus is primarily on cereals and bread, but the (albeit limited) consideration of diet across different social groups and the important research questions that this article posed about the relationship between diet, nutrition and health, famines and food shortages, and the food supply of large urban populations and of armies marked an important step forward in approach. The inclusion of a chart in Appendix E listing the calorific, protein, fat and carbohydrate values of common ancient foodstuffs, such as chestnuts, walnuts, figs, grapes, raisins and olives is also noteworthy. This was followed soon afterwards by Foxhall and Forbes’ pivotal article (1982) on grain as a staple food, considering the role of cereals in the diet of various segments of society and applying modern nutritional information to ancient populations to establish the amount of grain required to support an individual based on their age and sex.
In the 1980s and 1990s the field was dominated by Peter Garnsey, who produced a series of groundbreaking publications, focusing in particular on famine and food supply and (mal)nutrition (Garnsey, 1983; 1988; 1991; 1998; 1999). Drawing on a combination of ancient literature (most notably the medical writer Galen), biological science, anthropology, sociology, comparative evidence, skeletal data and archaeological material, he argued that much of the population of the Graeco-Roman world suffered from endemic undernourishment (contra Waterlow, 1989).? He emphasised that there was no single Mediterranean diet, and that access to food and vulnerability to food crises was determined by factors such as social status, age, gender and geographical location. This included not only regional variations in diet and susceptibility to famine and food shortages, but also differences in food supply between urban and rural populations. While rural populations had a direct connection to the food supply, urban populations were primarily dependent on the market. However, urban populations had something of an advantage in that the urban food supply was a matter of political importance, and elites very often intervened in the market to ensure an adequate food supply, while distributions of food, particularly grain, and the provision of public banquets were part of the world of euergetism. Consequently the urban grain supply, particularly that of Rome, and the relationship between food and politics have been the focus of a number of other important studies (e.g., Rickman, 1980a; Sirks, 1991; Virlouvet, 1995; 2009; Aldrete and Mattingly, 1999; Mattingly and Aldrete, 2000; Erdkamp, 2002; 2005; 2008; Broekaert and Zuiderhoek, 2012b).
In Food and Society in Classical Antiquity in particular (1999), Garnsey expanded his focus to consider the cultural and social aspects of food and commensality in more depth. As he emphasises in the preface, ‘food is a biocultural phenomenon . . . at once nutrition, needed by the body for survival, and cultural object, with various non-food uses and associations’ (Garnsey, 1999, xi). This reflects a longer-term trend in ancient food studies to consider the cultural, social, and religious factors that determined access to food. As Bradley noted (2001, 36), for example, while the consumption of food is essential, ‘the manner in which food is consumed and shared is a matter of cultural construction’, and in the Roman world, communal meals were important markers of status and one’s role within a community." Social hierarchies were reinforced by carefully considered seating plans and, very often, by the serving of different food and wine to diners as a reflection of their standing within the social hierarchy.
Commensality and the social context of meals have, therefore, received much attention, encouraged in part by a renewed interest in the Greek symposium from the 1980s onwards (Murray, 1990; Slater, 1991; Nielsen and Nielsen, 2001; Nadeau, 2010; Smith and Taussig, 2012). Given the nature of the ancient literary evidence, much of this work has focused on banquets taking place within elite households (cenae and convivia), which were crucial events in acquiring and maintaining the social and political status of Roman elites, including that of the emperor himself (e.g., Vdssing, 2004). D’Arms (1990; 1991), for example, explored the social world of the Roman convivium, while Dunbabin (1991; 2003) considered the physical spaces in which such meals took place, as well as providing a detailed analysis of artistic representations of Roman banquets and the role of the formal meal in Roman political and civic life (see also Stein-Hélkeskamp, 2005). The collection of essays edited by Nielsen and Nielsen expanded the focus to consider the experience of formal meals among the elite family more broadly, including children (Bradley, 2001; Nielsen, 2001), while a 2003 special edition of The American Journal of Philology focused on dining in the Roman world and included an exploration of the complexities of female posture at the convivium (Roller, 2003).'! Petronius’ much-studied Cena of Trimalchio in the Satyricon provides a satirical account of a wealthy freedman imitating the dining culture of the elite, although much of the humour for a contemporary audience must have been found in his misreading of the carefully constructed language of the aristocratic banquet (Wallace-Hadrill, 1994, 6; see also Dupont, 1977 on the cena Trimalchionis).
Scholarship has also noted the sharing of food among those outside of the upper echelons of society, where communal meals took place in a variety of ritual, religious and social settings. Public feasting (the cena and the epulum) was, for example, a central part of civic life in the Roman world, whether it was banquets sponsored by the emperor in Rome or by local elites in Italy and the provinces, or meals linked to religious festivals or to the lifecycle, such as marriages and funerals (Donahue, 2003; 2004a). At a family and community level, the communal meal was also commonplace, be it an everyday family meal or people meeting together for a social, political or religious purpose. Meals accompanied funerals (Graham, 2005, 58-63; Lindsay, 2001), and were a central part of the life of collegia; the well-known inscription from Lanuvium detailing the laws of the collegium of Diana and Antinous includes many rules regulating the behaviour of members at banquets (AD 136; CIL 14.2112).'* Urban inhabitants also ate together in commercialised settings, such as bars and inns (Ellis, 2012). Commensality was equally important among particular religious groups, including (but by no means limited to) Jews, Christians and the Qumran-Essene communities (Bilde, 2001; Hallback, 2001; Noy, 2001; White, 2001; Smith, 2003; 2015). For certain groups, such as Jews, and to a lesser extent philosophers and early Christians, regulations restricting the type of food that could be eaten, and with whom, became part of the construction of their identity (Feely-Harnick, 1981; Garnsey, 1999, 82-99; Kraemer, 2009; Rosenblum, 2010; Erdkamp, 2011; Freidenreich, 2011; Nadeau, 2012; see also Beer, 2010). Furthermore, for Roman writers, changes in diet were a reflection of wider social, economic and cultural developments and shifting identities (Purcell, 2003).
Research into Roman diet has, therefore, moved beyond the initial focus on adult male elites in Rome and Italy. This trend can also be seen in the broadening geographical scope, which has moved beyond the ‘core’ Mediterranean regions to consider other areas. Eating and drinking in Roman Britain, for example, has been the subject of several specialised studies, relying by necessity almost entirely on archaeological material (e.g. Meadows, 1997; 1999; Alcock, 2001; Cool, 2006). Developments in osteoarchaeology and archaeobotany in particular have made such studies possible; from the 1970s onwards, for example, the collection, identification and interpretation of plant remains became commonplace in archaeological excavations, a trend facilitated by the introduction of machine-assisted flotation techniques, the increased frequency of pollen analysis, and developments in techniques of phytolith analysis.!? The food supply of the Roman army has been considered in some depth (e.g. Davies, 1971; Erdkamp, 1998; Roth, 1999; Kehne, 2011). The relationship between diet and health in ancient medical writers — most notably Galen, whose treatises On the Powers of Food and On Barley Soup in particular, and to a lesser extent On Hygiene, explored the health-giving properties of foods (Grant, 2000) — and the role of food as medicine, have been explored (e.g. Garnsey, 1999; Mazzini, 1999; Wilkins and Hill, 2006, 213-244; Nadeau, 2012). Numerous cookbooks of ancient recipes have been published, inspired in large part by the ancient ‘cookbook’ attributed to Apicius, which was most likely compiled around the fourth to fifth century AD.'* Such cookbooks are mainly aimed at a popular audience but give some sense of how Roman food might actually have tasted (e.g., Giacosa, 1992; Dalby and Grainger, 1996; Grant, 1999; Renfrew, 2004; Segan, 2004; Grainger, 2006). The recent publication of A Companion to Food in the Ancient World (Wilkins and Nadeau, 2015), with chapters by almost 40 different authors covering all of these topics and more, and a new sourcebook on food and drink in antiquity (Donahue, 2015b), both intended to introduce a new audience to ancient food studies, are testimony to the thriving nature of the discipline.
The need for multidisciplinarity
Diet and nutrition are important topics in themselves, but they are also crucial aspects of demographic and economic history. It is often held that, if living standards and nutrition improved, population rose, and vice versa. Studies of past societies have shown, however, that there is no simple correlation between nutrition on the one hand and mortality and fertility on the other, but it does seem that below a certain level of nutrition, further decrease resulted in higher levels of mortality and lower levels of fertility.!° In particular, infant mortality is related to the nutritional status of women. The food supply may also be linked to mortality more indirectly, as in the rise in deaths that is observable in premodern Europe even after minor harvest failures, which was due to the spread of infectious diseases rather than the direct consequences of hunger. In times of dearth the number of deaths increased among all classes more or less evenly, but with a time lag among the higher classes, indicating that price rises caused rising mortality primarily through diseases, and that nutritional status offered little protection against the latter. At some point in early-modern Europe, the correlation between harvest failure and mortality disappeared, which is not so much related to rises in productivity as to changes in government and society, which protected the most vulnerable and prevented the disastrous cycle of disease and death from happening. The Roman world does not offer us the demographic data that are required to study the link between nutrition and mortality in the same way as for later premodern societies, but two interesting observations may result from the comparison: first, the link between nutrition, fertility and mortality was undoubtedly as complex in Roman times as in later premodern societies; second, social, political and economic conditions were as important in determining these links as the physical environment of agriculture, climate and biology.'® Equally complex is the correlation between nutrition and economy. Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel argued that most people in premodern societies were simply not adequately fed and healthy enough to be very productive and that progress in productivity in modern society was made possible by recent developments in health and nutrition.'’ The economic historian Gregory Clark maintained that thousands of years of economic development made little progress in living standards. The technological advance and rising labour input between the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution did not mean that the individuals involved were fed any better. People in premodern Europe worked harder not in order to fulfil their nutritional needs with better foods — on the contrary, Clark argues — but to feed more of them. There is no trend in improving living conditions up to the Industrial Revolution, but that does not mean that there are no differences in living standards between premodern societies. However, these differences are not linked to technology or economic progress, but to demography. The main point of Clark is that under Malthusian constraints, living standards and nutrition are determined by the balance between mortality and fertility. Clark points to Polynesians, who lived wellnourished lives, not because they spend so many hours working or because their environment was so very productive, but because high mortality resulting from infanticide, human sacrifice and endemic warfare kept population low.'® Malthusian models have rightly come under severe criticism and so has Clark’s, because the links between population, living standards, fertility and demography are not as rigid as Malthusians suppose, but the provocative way in which Clark poses his extreme statements offer food for thought: to what extent is food and nutrition a function of productivity and technology, of agriculture and climate, and to what extent is access to food determined by social and political factors? Basically, the question is to what extent was there scope for improvement in diet and nutrition in the Roman world? Did they actually improve?
Answering these questions requires a multidisciplinary approach in which all kinds of sources are combined. Written and visual sources, which offer a wealth of details on diet, food and dishes, have a long tradition in the exploration of ancient food and foodways. Literary sources, including fiction, biographies, letters and philosophical discourses, mention rations offered to soldiers, citizens or slaves, and meals eaten by various classes of society, sometimes going into considerable detail.!? Agricultural writers inform us how to produce, process and store a wide range of foodstuffs. Medical treaties provide us with their authors’ insights into nutritional aspects of health and food. Inscriptions mention the involvement of magistrates and benefactors in the market supply and provisioning of various foodstuffs on different occasions and in different contexts, including bread, wine, olive oil, meat and fish. In particular the papyri may be supposed to offer particularly valuable information regarding the daily lives of common people in Roman Egypt. On a much smaller scale we have similar evidence in the wooden Vindolanda tablets, which contain official and private documents of a cohort stationed at Hadrian’s Wall. However, even regarding the papyri or the Vindolanda tablets, it turns out to be not so very easy to combine the available data into a reconstruction of diet and nutrition of individual people, as it is difficult to generalize the fragmented data into a coherent and comprehensive picture. The literary and epigraphic sources are subject to social and gender bias, as the authors are generally male members of elite urban classes, or at least closely connected to the upper layers of society. Hence, literary accounts provide details concerning the more or less luxurious meals of the richest members of society, but there is a tendency to mention the exceptional and remarkable rather than narrating the mundane minutiae of upperclass everyday life. It is also not the case that these urban writers do not pay attention to the food of poor inhabitants of the countryside. Ovid (Metamorphoses 8.630—678) is quite specific in his narration of the meal that an elderly couple of smallholders offers to Jupiter and Mercury in the guise of common travellers, while the poem Moretum famously describes in much detail the morning meal of a farmer before he ploughs his fields. However, these narratives primarily reflect the author’s desire to depict these characters as sober-living and content rustics and the prejudices of both writers and their well-to-do urban audience. This is even true of medical writers, who might be thought to be trustworthy witnesses of the realities of rural foodways or the differences in the diet and food habits of men and women, but their prescriptive accounts are partly based on their ideas of what should be, and not what is.
When discussing the diet of the common people in the city and in the countryside, we need to differentiate among those social and economic classes that are too easily lumped together as ‘the masses’ or ‘the common people’. There is no reason to doubt the literary sources, such as Columella or Galen, that describe poor dwellers of the countryside as largely living on porridges of coarse grains, or some of them as surviving the winter on dried apples and vetches (normally considered fodder rather than food). But what part of the populace is actually described in these passages? How large is this segment of society, and how common was it for the urban and rural poor to survive on the most frugal of diets? Between the unemployed and homeless beggars who literally starved in the streets of the cities and the highest echelons of society, i.e., the senators, urban councillors and large-landowners, there are many levels of poverty and prosperity, and hence we need to differentiate between various social and economic layers of society. The most vulnerable groups in society are likely to have been the unemployed in the cities, the landless rural proletariat, and in particular the women and children of these classes. The social and gender bias of the written sources and their fragmented, one-sided and incomplete nature makes it nearly impossible to describe on the basis of this kind of evidence only the diet and nutrition of the inhabitants of town and countryside in the Roman world in sufficient shades of grey.
It is often said that archaeology lacks the geographical and social bias of the written sources, but that does not mean that the data unearthed by paleobotanists, archaeozoologists and other specialists are straightforward and uncomplicated, even apart from the fact that archaeological research into food and diet is not evenly spread among the countries that once formed the Roman Empire. The fact that most finds of pepper are located in Britain is, for example, due to the excellent state of archaeological research in this far corner of the Roman Empire rather than its greater presence there. Nevertheless, archaeology is less determined by an urban, upperclass and male perspective than the written sources.
We may distinguish three kinds of archaeological evidence on food and foodways: first, the food itself and the waste associated with it; second, the material environment of consumption, providing insight into the social context of meals of various social groups; and third, the tools and equipment of the processing, preparation, storage and consumption of food and drink.”” Most valuable are the insights offered by food remains that are found in the physical context of their processing or consumption, i.e. primary deposits, but much of the evidence derives from secondary deposits, i.e. remains that have been moved and disposed elsewhere. The list of foodstuffs represented by the botanical and faunal material found in a wide variety of contexts, going from kitchen and dinner room floors to waste-pits and sewers, is endless.?! The context of these finds, broadly defined, is crucial for their interpretation. For example, the presence or absence of waste and by-products sheds light on processing activities, whether animals were slaughtered at a different location than their meat was consumed, or whether foodstuffs were cooked at the same location as they were eaten. Hence, written sources on everyday practices are vital for our understanding of the context of archaeological findings. Also the comparison with practices of later times — for example, on storage, processing and preparation of food — is very important, as this informs us about practices that may be lacking from the written evidence and the archaeological remains.
Crucially, the botanical and faunal remains are not a random representation of the diet and hence there is no simple correlation between what is found and what was eaten. The bias in the remains of plants and animals is due to their physical characteristics and the ways of storage and preparation that partly determine their chance of survival. Not only the food itself, but also the containers in which it was stored and distributed, are subject to unequal degradation. For example, stone fruit such as peaches, cherries and apricot will more likely be found than fruit or vegetables that have no robust parts, while dairy products leave far fewer traces than wine or olive oil, which were processed, stored and transported in almost indestructible presses and amphorae. Soil conditions are important too, as bones decompose in acid soils much faster than in others. Finally, ways of preparation determine survival rates of particular foodstuffs, as the charred remains of food that came close to fire during its preparation had a vastly greater chance of survival into modern days than foodstuffs that were prepared without fire. In short, what is mostly found is not necessarily what was mainly eaten.
The consumption of meat and fish is a particularly valuable indicator of changes in living standards, as a rise in spending power will not result in more consumption of the same, but in a gradual shift of consumption towards more luxurious items. As Willem Jongman pointed out, Engel’s Law predicts that the spending on basic necessities at first rises with income, but as income increases further, people will generally spend more on expensive sources of calories, such as meat or fish. In other words, a rise in meat consumption reflects a general rise in income.” There is a tendency to associate meat consumption in Greek society with animal sacrifices, with little meat consumption outside a context of religious feasts.?? It is commonly assumed that this was much less the case in Roman times and that many people, including the urban and rural poor, had regular access to meat.?* However, it is not unproblematic to prove a general rise in meat consumption in Roman times on the basis of the archaeological data.
The analysis of animal bones at various sites throughout the Roman Empire does point to a widespread shift in meat consumption and meat processing. We see relative changes in the proportion of the main meat-providing animals, with a shift towards pigs in some places, cattle in others.?> These changes not only reflect regional ecological and cultural variances, but also differences between urban and rural sites and between civil and military contexts.2° Pork was the favoured meat of the Romans, and in the provinces it is particularly associated with highstatus, Romanized and military sites.2” The age distribution of slaughtered animals sheds light on the animal husbandry at various sites, while the composition of bone-finds informs us about slaughtering practices. Cut-marks on bones indicate increasing professionalism of butchering practices in urban contexts. The predominance of older animals shows that livestock was often held particularly for the secondary products, i.e., traction in the case of oxen, wool and milk in the case of sheep and goats. Only pigs were held primarily for their meat. Unequal preservation of animal remains leads to some bias in the remains, as smaller animals are less well preserved and therefore underrepresented. Nevertheless, recent studies confirm the increasing consumption of, for example, chicken. Also dairy products are generally underrepresented in the evidence, as both the products (milk, cheese) and the equipment — generally made of wood — are perishable. Recent studies have also shed light on the widespread consumption of fish. The written evidence seemed to suggest that this was a relatively expensive product, while fishing techniques in the ancient Mediterranean world used to be seen as underdeveloped and unproductive. Careful analysis of faunal remains has indicated a greater role of marine foods and pointed out the vital importance of coastal lagoons and wetlands for the consumption of marine foods in a wider area.”* All in all, the archaeological data indicate a widespread increase in the role of meat and fish in the everyday food consumption of large segments of society, but it remains unclear to what extent this trend affected the poorer classes.
The statistical analysis of data from different sites requires standardly applied methods and practices, as it would be difficult otherwise to compare results and to draw more general conclusions from separate case studies. Archaeologists distinguish various contexts, such as urban or rural, civil or military, villa or smallholding, local or Roman, and deduce patterns based on the variations between these contexts and the changes over time. Scholars need to apply standard measures and measurements in order to prevent distortions stemming from inter-observer differences or variations in recording practices.”” However, the main limitation is that it remains very difficult to translate data of finds spread over time and space into reconstructions of individual consumption among the various segments of society. For example, we find a wide variety of foodstuffs in the sewers of one particular insula-building in Herculaneum, including common items such as figs, grapes, olives, eggs and shell-fish, but also small birds, coastal fish and crustaceans, some of which are regarded as expensive and luxurious.*” Nevertheless, conclusions regarding the diet of the inhabitants of the apartments above are not straightforward, as it is not easy to distinguish the common from the exceptional, to determine the social makeup of these insulae and to distinguish the diet of the various households and their members. Zooming in on the diet of particular groups of different age, gender and social class requires a multidisciplinary approach that takes into account all kinds of written, visual and archaeological sources. In view of the unequal entitlement to food and the cultural views on what was appropriate food for men, women and children of different ages, the challenge is to go beyond the statistics of findings at particular sites and to answer the question of which foodstuffs in what quantities and at which frequencies were consumed by individual men, women and children of different social classes.
It is precisely in the bioarchaeological research into the health and nutrition of individuals from the past that giant steps forward have been made in recent decades. We may distinguish the study of health, which is mainly the field of paleopathology and postcranial morphology, and the investigation of diet by means of the biochemical analysis of human remains and the investigation of teeth. Dental evidence has been used to reconstruct individual diets by linking rates of caries and calculus to differences in the composition of the diet.*! Paleopathology investigates patterns of disease on the basis on skeletal remains, while an important aspect of postcranial morphology is the study of differences in stature, in particular the length of the femur, and developments over time thereof, as an indication of changes in health and nutrition.*
Deficiencies in the intake of nutrients leave traces in human skeletons, which offers insight into the health and/or diet of individuals. In particular since the last quarter of the twentieth century, studies of human remains from antiquity have, for instance, explored the presence of enamel hypoplasia (stress lines in tooth enamel) as possible indicators of food deprivation and cribra orbitalia (the porous condition of eye-sockets) as possibly showing chronic anaemia.*? In the light of the emphasis on malnutrition and deprivation in premodern societies in food studies at the time, one could even say that many researchers expected to find indicators of poor diets. As important as such research is, one has to realize the complexities of the correlation between stress markers in human bones, disease and nutrition in order to avoid a priori assumptions and distorted results. Specialists are now careful in their conclusions, pointing out that skeletal lesions or other features of human bones can be caused by various conditions and thus are not specific for one particular disease or disorder. Insufficient intake of nutrients may have been caused by an inadequate diet, but also by diseases or disorders that hampered the body’s ability to absorb nutrients. Rickets and similar conditions are often diagnosed, but may possibly have been caused more often by gastro-intestinal diseases than by deficiencies of the diet. Similarly, anaemia can be related to several causes, one of which may be iron-deficiency in the diet, but the symptoms may just as likely have been caused by a genetic condition of the blood-cells, lead-poisoning or parasites. In short, diagnosis is difficult on the basis of osteological data alone.*4 On the other hand, not all effects of a deficient intake of minerals and vitamins can be deduced from the skeleton, while there are many diseases or disorders that leave no marks on the bones (or at least not marks that are specific for that disease).
Stature is used as a proxy for health and nutrition in past populations and even as an indicator of economic performance.*? Koepke and Baten (2005) investigated the long-term development of bodily length within Europe from the start of the common era into the early-modern period (see also Flohr in this volume). Their graphs show that stature increased after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and again when the Black Death struck in the fourteenth century. Hence, while carefully considering the possible determinants of changes in average stature, they conclude that the changes over time reflect a Malthusian scenario, in which average nutrition declined when population rose and improved when population fell. Potential height within a population is genetically determined and whether this potential is reached in individuals can be related to many interconnected determinants, including changes in diet, diseases, urbanization and employment, and hence it is difficult to link long-term trends to one cause. Short-term effects of temporary shortages were probably compensated afterwards, which can be related to variations in timing and duration of the physical development of children over time. The longterm effects of deprivation on the mental health of survivors are far beyond the potential of our sources.
Apart from the investigation of dental remains, individual diet is examined in the biochemical analysis of bone and dental remains. Stable isotope analysis is based on the fact that the biochemical characteristics of tissue reflect the properties of the food consumed when that tissue was formed. Carbon isotopes differ according to the photosynthetic pathways of terrestrial and marine plants, and animals consuming these plants, while nitrogen levels are linked to the consumer’s position in the food chain. A ‘higher’ position in the food chain results in higher 3'5N levels (the so-called trophic level effect). As various foodstuffs have different carbon and nitrogen characteristics, the biochemical analysis of human tissue broadly reveals the composition of an individual’s diet. However, isotope analysis cannot distinguish specific foodstuffs; an individual’s diet is only revealed in broad categories, such as wheat and/or barley as opposed to millet, marine or terrestrial food, etc.*° Moreover, more should be known about the impact of biochemical processes on stable isotope values and the possible distortion of reconstructions of diets.°” Nevertheless, even if only in broad terms, individual results can be taken as the basis for comparative analysis of specific features of particular social, cultural and geographical communities and gender and age-groups.*®
As dental tissue is formed at different ages and retains its biochemical characteristics, in particular the isotope analysis of deciduous teeth in comparison to the teeth and bones of adults reflects changes in diet at different ages. Change over time in the biochemical characteristics within the dental tissue of an individual is interpreted as indicating a change in physical surroundings, which in turn may indicate migration.*? The problem here is that little is known of the impact of local variations in physical conditions on isotope values, so that ‘migration’ may be very local.
The distinction between boys and girls at relatively young ages is difficult to make on the basis of skeletons, so it is not possible to study differences in gender at young ages. It would have been particularly interesting to compare the ideas expressed in medical treatises on the appropriate nourishment of male and female children with the picture emerging from isotope analysis. However, the written and bioarchaeological evidence can be combined in the study of weaning ages in the Roman world. The trophic level effect applies to breastfeeding as well, so that breastfed children have higher nitrogen properties than their mothers. Comparing nitrogen isotopes of infants and children with those of adult women in the same community reveals the age at which the isotope values of infants lower to the same level as that of their mother, in other words the age at which infants are weaned onto foods similar to those eaten by adults. Variations within the Roman world can be linked to cultural differences.*”
We may conclude with the observation that, in contrast to bioarchaeological evidence, which reveals diet and nutrition at the individual level, but in broad terms, written evidence, paleobotany and zooarchaeology offer very detailed information, which, however, is not easily broken down into the individual level. Archaeological research avoids the urban, upper-class and male biases of the written sources, but the written evidence is vital for shedding light on the contexts of the archaeological finds of food, waste and physical settings of consumption in the Roman world, and it offers insights to cultural and ideological aspects of food that are not always visible in the material evidence. The context of material evidence is crucial for interpretations that avoid the biases inherent in archaeological data. In sum, a multidisciplinary approach will not only reveal the geographical, cultural and social variations in diet and nutrition in the Roman world, but also the changes over time that ultimately can be linked to demographic and economic developments.
What follows
This book is structured in five parts. The first part introduces the reader to the wide range of evidence concerning food and nutrition, the nature of the various sources, and their methodological implications. Kim Beerden sets out to deconstruct the idea that literary and documentary textual evidence allows us to draw an objective image of diet and nutrition, but she also points out that the sources offer a wealth of information on attitudes, norms and values related to food. Shana O’Connell explains the functions and motives of the various genres of pictorial sources, which determine the image emerging from the visual evidence. For those readers who are unfamiliar with the way archaeobotanists, zooarchaeologists, physical anthropologists and other specialists in these fields generate and interpret their data, the next chapters in this section clarify the key concepts and methodological tools in each field of expertise. Laura Banducci explains the methods archaeologists use to answer questions regarding diet from the artefacts involved in the preservation, processing and cooking of food. Alexandra Livarda and Paul Halstead explore the methods employed in the study of plant and animal evidence respectively, and the limitations and the possibilities in this line of inquiry, with the aim of shedding light on the potential of archaeobotanical and archaeozoological research. Chryssi Bourbou deals with the contribution of osteoarchaeology to the reconstruction of Roman dietary patterns, through the study of specific pathological conditions and stable isotope analysis.
The overview of the various items of food and drink in Part II focuses on variation and diversity. John Donahue places the various meals in a social context, which shaped their character and influenced the food that was consumed. There was, for example, a distinction between the meals that were eaten by different members of a household in and outside of a domestic setting, particularly in cities, where the largest part of the population did not have the Opportunity to prepare large meals in their private dwellings. The other chapters discuss particular kinds of food, stressing the variety within each category. Variation, for example, in the sense of different kinds of cereals and pulses and the food items made from them, ranging from gruel to white bread, which are discussed by Frits Heinrich and Annette Hansen. Such variation characterizes all the categories that are distinguished in this section: Erica Rowan outlines the evidence for the trade and consumption of table olives and olive oil, elucidating the dietary and nutritional role of this staple food. In his chapter on beverages, Wim Broekaert discusses among others wine and wine-related drinks, which vary from the famous Falernian wine to the pulp that remains after pressing, which was given to the servile workforce to drink. Michael MacKinnon emphasizes the need for a nuanced reconstruction of the consumption of meat and other animal products across time and space by integrating textual and visual evidence with faunal remains from Roman archaeological sites. Annalisa Marzano discusses the entire range of seafood, from common saltwater fish to the most luxurious items on the aristocratic dinner tables, emphasizing the vital contribution of marine foods to the diet of many people. In all of these chapters, the question ‘who ate what’ is related to the issues of preservation, storage and transportation, with obvious implications for the availability of; on the one hand, vegetables, fruit, herbs and spices, and, on the other, meat and other animal products such as milk and cheese. In short, in this section the consumption of the broad range of items in each category by various groups in society is related to production, processing, preservation, distribution and cultural preferences regarding consumption.
The volume is concerned with the ‘Roman world’, but this label encompasses a wide geographical, social and cultural range. Descriptions and studies of food in the Roman world tend to be dominated by the perspective of the adult male Greek or Roman in the Mediterranean core-regions of the Roman Empire. The next section aims to go beyond this viewpoint. Christian Laes gives particular attention to women and children within urban and rural households. Other societies often show that the entitlement of women and children to food was inferior to that of adult men, and the Roman world also offers indications of their inferiority and dependency in this regard. This section furthermore aims to identify the particular views on food of peoples beyond the Graeco-Roman core. The ethnic and cultural diversity within the empire was reflected in varied diets. At the same time, acculturation and the distribution of goods through trade and army supply introduced Roman ideas and Mediterranean food items to a much wider world. Three regions and/or peoples are selected to discuss these issues: Ttinde Kaszab-Olschewski exposes the diversity of diet across the provinces of central and western Europe; David Kraemer discusses the diet of Jews in Palestine and the diaspora, but he points out that the diverse attitudes to food make it impossible to speak of a ‘Jewish’ diet; Willy Clarysse explores the unique possibilities of the papyri and ostraca to explore the diet of various segments of the populace of Roman Egypt, although it remains difficult to draw general conclusions from the numerous scraps of information. The section ends with the impact of Christianity on food and eating culture. Emmanuelle Raga shows that, while food and diet at first played no great role in early Christian discourse, it became a central issue in the developing Christian ethos, leading to the spread of asceticism as the proper way of life of a good Christian.
New research in the field of physical anthropology has created new possibilities to shed light on the nature of the diet and quality of nourishment of various groups at different times and regions in the Roman world. However, the interpretation of the data generated by recent research is not beyond debate; opinions differ not only on diet, nourishment and the extent of malnutrition in the various parts of the Roman world, but also on what this kind of research can and cannot reveal. Part IV therefore provides a forum to three scholars to offer their thoughts on the issues of diet, malnutrition and stature. Kristina Killgrove offers a careful survey of what recent bioarchaeological investigations in Italy tell us about the diet and nutrition of various segments of society. Geoffrey Kron argues that relatively low levels of social inequality resulted in nutritious diets and high levels of living standards for most people, reflected in high stature as revealed by average femur lengths in Italy and beyond. Miko Flohr responds by drawing attention to the limits of what physical anthropology, and in particular femur length, can tell us about average levels of nutrition, arguing that at this point it is not yet possible to draw definite conclusions.
In the final section, Claire Holleran explores the urban food supply. Despite the elite ideology of autarky and the role of imperial rulers in feeding certain segments of society, a large part of the population of the Roman world depended on commercial channels for their access to food, and few were entirely separated from the market. Hence the commercial channels involved in the distribution of various foodstuffs are an important aspect of diet and nourishment.
However, local authorities and imperial rules intervened regularly in the food supply, determining the margins in which the market operated. Supply systems sometimes failed, in extreme cases leading to widespread starvation and famine (which is related to but should be separated from the issue of structural malnourishment), but it is nearly impossible to quantify the impact of famines on the basis of the ancient sources alone. Paul Erdkamp attempts to assess the impact of food crises by analysing their causes and the coping strategies available to individuals and communities in the Roman world and by comparing the impressionistic accounts of ancient authors to the hard data of early-modern documentary evidence.
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