Using Skeletal Remains as a Proxy for Roman Lifestyles

Analysis of human skeletal remains is becoming increasingly common in classical bioarchaeology, particularly because of the way historians and demographers have begun to pair osteological and biochemical data with evidence from archaeology, epigraphy, and historical records. The field of bioarchaeology has been practised since the 1970s in both the US and the UK, so some geographical and temporal areas have been well studied and methods have been honed in order to answer questions as fully as possible. This is not the case in classical bioarchaeology, where the application of skeletal analysis to answer questions about the Greco-Roman world is much more recent. Skeletons and cemeteries are largely being studied piecemeal owing to vagaries in collections, funding, and personnel available for these sorts of analyses. While the US and UK benefit from published standards for data collection, making many data comparable across time and space, data collection is more haphazard in the Mediterranean. Some researchers use the US Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains (Buikstra and Ubelaker, 1994), some researchers use the UK Guidelines to the Standards for Recording Human Remains (Brickley and McKinley, 2004), and others use methods drawn from one or more additional sources (e.g., Moore-Jansen et al., 1994, Steckel et al., 2005; see also individual countries in Márquez-Grant and Fibiger, 2011). The lack of standardization in data collection leads to problems in undertaking synthetic treatments of classical bioarchaeological data. This in turn means a difficulty in being able to marshal evidence to answer larger questions about complicated topics such as imperialism, migration, and health. No true synthetic treatments of classical bioarchaeological data yet exist, although several recent edited volumes have begun to bring together osteological, biochemical, and contextual data for the Greek (e.g., Schepartz et al., 2009) and the Roman world (e.g., Eckardt, 2010, Piccioli et al., 2015).