Osteobiographies at the Edge of Empire

Abstract

The aim of this research is to employ osteobiography as a means of learning about individuals in the past. Osteobiography entails a life-history approach in the analysis of skeletal human remains. Two groups that have been characterized in the literature as ‘Romans’ and ‘barbarians’ were analyzed by the author. The research questions used skeletal remains to address how the daily life of people under Roman control compared to that of their neighbors to the north, the ‘barbarians’. Looking at two contemporaneous populations from the territory of modern Romania and dating from the 3rd to the 6th centuries AD, the study examines pathological conditions and traumatic injuries, in order to gain a better understanding of the general quality of life for these individuals. One collection comes from the site of Ibida (Slava Rusă) from the Roman province of Scythia Minor, and the other originates from the Târgşor site, located to the north of the Danube frontier, in what was considered the ‘barbaricum’ (the land beyond Roman administrative control).1 For the purposes of this article, two individuals from each group were selected and are presented in depth herein.