University of Groningen
Diet, differentiation and globalization in the Roman province of Macedonia. A
bioarchaeological approach
Vergidou, Chryssa
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Vergidou, C. (2020). Diet, differentiation and globalization in the Roman province of Macedonia. A
bioarchaeological approach. TMA, 62, 83.
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Diet, differentiation and globalization in the Roman province of Macedonia. A bioarchaeological approach
Introduction
83 Food and diet are inextricably enmeshed within society,
economy, and culture. As such, they can both become valuable tools for the understanding of any society and the social forces at play within the various strands of its struc-ture. In recent decades, advances in the field of bioarchae-ology have led to an increased interest in the social role of food and diet in the past through the study of human skeletal remains. Furthermore, palaeodietary reconstruc-tion studies have been conducted in many regions all over the world. In Greece, the topic has also received consider-able attention and a number of studies conducted on pre-historic and pre-historic assemblages have proven insightful. However, a research lacuna exists in the literature in that the Roman Era remains terra incognita.
This project is the first to integrate bioarchaeological, contextual, and textual evidence in Roman Macedonia and the first to provide a multi-methodological dietary analy-sis by employing macroscopic and biochemical methods. Using this approach, my study will try to detect the extent to which dietary preferences relate to and influence the way particular social or ethnic groups of the province pos-itioned themselves within the region of Macedonia and within the Roman Empire as a whole. For this project, two contemporary cemeteries (Pontokomi, site Vrisi and Nea Kerdyllia, site Strovolos) of the Imperial Period in Roman Macedonia (in use from the first to the fourth century AD), which are distinct in terms of their micro-ecology, will be examined. The goal is threefold. The first goal is to investigate how local micro-ecology and distance from the main socio-economic hubs affected local diet at the level of each community. The second is to correlate dietary variation with differential mortuary treatment and to ex-plore differences in age, sex, kinship, and status divisions within and between the two communities. Under these premises, dietary variation and differences in the health and lifestyle of the two provincial communities, and of their social subgroups, will be used as a proxy to recon-struct social differentiation and the incorporation of the communities into the globalizing networks of the Roman Empire. The ultimate goal is to explore how people living under the Roman Empire were redefining their identities by adopting new lifestyles and novel mortuary practices. The methodological approach adopted will have multiple objectives. To identify and reconstruct dietary patterns, approximately 200 skeletons will be examined and a mul-tifactorial approach focusing on dental pathologies1 (e.g. caries, enamel hypoplasia, see figure 1), dental attrition, and stable isotopic analysis2 (carbon, nitrogen and sul-phur) will be implemented. The results from the analyses will be integrated with the results of a contextual analysis
of the mortuary customs in order to identify social differ-entiation. Finally, the results of the study of the skeletal remains and the contextual analysis will be compared with textual evidence in order to place the discussion within a broader cultural and historical framework.
This study is innovative because it will make use of dif-ferent methodologies for dietary reconstruction in a re-gion hitherto virtually unstudied, it will provide crucial new insights into diet in the ancient world, and it will contribute to the Romanization debate through a bioar-chaeological perspective. It will also provide significant insights for the field of archaeological science as it will of-fer a holistic approach into past dietary reconstruction by integrating different current analytical techniques and by testing the results against historical data.
Chryssa Vergidou (c.vergidou@rug.nl) obtained a bache-lor’s degree in Archaeology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2005 and received her master’s degree in Human Osteology at Leiden University in 2016. She is currently a double degree PhD candidate at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology and the Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Centre (STARC) of The Cyprus Institute.
Endnotes
1 Hillson, S. 2008, “Dental pathology” in Biological
anthro-pology of the human skeleton, (eds.) M.A. Katzenberg & S.R.
Saunders, pp. 301-340.
2 Katzenberg, M.A. 2008, “Stable isotope analysis: A tool for studying past diet, demography, and life history” in Biological
anthropology of the human skeleton, (eds.) M.A. Katzenberg &
S.R. Saunders, pp. 413-441.
Diet, differentiation and globalization in the Roman province of Macedonia
A bioarchaeological approach
PhD research (University of Groningen and STARC - The Cyprus Institute), Chryssa Vergidou
Figure 1. Adult mandibular left canine showing the presence of enamel hypoplasia as a possible indicator of food deprivation; Pontokomi ske-letal assemblage, Kozani, Greece, first to fourth century AD (photo by author with the kind permission of Dr. Karamitrou-Mentesidi).
