Willem Jongman, Jan Jacobs, and Geertje Goldewijk: Health and Wealth in the Roman Empire: "Archaeological research of the last few decades has given us far better data... substantial increases in rural site numbers and site sizes... hand-in-hand with a substantial urban growth from existing and new towns. In Italy this rural and urban growth mostly occurred from the late fourth or early third century B.C., and in the provinces often following Roman conquest.... Numbers mostly peak in the first and early second century A.D., followed by often quite dramatic decline, mostly from the late second century A.D., after the so-called Antonine Plague...
...The historical question is about the consequences of this quite massive growth and subsequent decline in population: did standard of living respond in Malthusian fashion or, alternatively, was the population boom the response to increased prosperity, and the subsequent decline the response to increased poverty?... Our project set out to collect the largest possible dataset of skeletal data on body length for the entire territory of the Roman Empire, and for the entire period of more than 1000 years.... We classified the information on long bones into fifty-year birth year cohorts....
Almost all other indicators of standard of living that we have for the Roman world show the opposite pattern from the two health indicators of biological standard of living and life expectancy.
The first of these indicators is wage data, even if they are not very good.... For the second and first century B.C. we only... 800 prices of manumissions from Delphi.... It is clear that first slave prices were high, and hence that wages for free labour must have been well above subsistence.... Second, there is a clearly upward trend from about 3500kg of wheat equivalent in the first half of the second century to about 7000 kg of wheat equivalent in the last half of the first century B.C.... The rising trend of slave prices in this period also demonstrates that slavery in this period did not increase because of the increased supply, but because of the even larger increase in demand. The second set of wage data is from Roman Egypt... clear growth of family incomes from about two times subsistence at the beginning of the first century A.D. to about four times subsistence in the 160s, just before the Antonine Plague.... The third data type is from Diocletian's edict on maximum prices, promulgated in A.D. 301.... Family incomes were only just above subsistence. Clearly by that time Romans were not doing very well anymore....
That picture of increasing prosperity followed by quite dramatic decline is mirrored in archaeological data on consumption patterns... animal bone assemblages as a proxy for meat consumption.... An estimate by Andrew Wilson of the installed capacity of surviving Roman fish salting installations shows a similar pattern, though in less dramatic form (Wilson, 2006).... Erica Rowan's analysis of the content of the main sewer at Herculaneum in relation to the houses above (Rowan, 2017). The range and quality of fruit and vegetables are quite staggering, and so are meat and fish remains, and not just for the houses of the wealthy.... Archaeobotanical remains from mostly the north- western provinces show a dramatic increase in the range of fruits and vegetables, precisely from the time of Roman conquest, and lasting little beyond the demise of the Roman Empire in the West (Bakels and Jacomet, 2003). The demand for high income elasticity food is similarly visible in the boom in the consumption of olive oil and even more so wine (Brun, 2003). Those were expensive calories, and particularly in the case of wine (Jongman, 2016). In short, there is overwhelming evidence for improvements in the diet precisely during the peak period of Roman power and population, both in Italy and in the provinces....
Roman housing stock was of far better quality than what had come before or would come after. One sign of this is the time series for building wood recovered from rivers in Western Germany (Fig. 10, with data from Holstein, 1980). These houses were also increasingly equipped with metal fixtures such as door and window hinges or locks, and even window glass. Inside such houses we find metal kitchen utensils, furniture, nice ceramic tableware, glass and items for personal- care. As every field archaeologist knows, the quantity and quality of Roman material culture was far better than what came before or would come after....
Body length may reflect health but not wealth, and for now this is the most plausible hypothesis.... Nutritional status can be impaired very seriously by infectious disease, as the body has to work so much harder to fight off the infection, or cannot absorb the nutrients... endemic infectious diseases... malaria... intestinal worms.... Population densities in many parts of the Roman Empire were significantly higher than before or after. But that was not all: Roman culture and society were decidedly urban, with more and far larger cities than Europe would see until the modern age.... The majority of the urban population lived a truly urban life in large cities, unlike for much of mediaeval and early modern Europe. Such high levels of urbanization are likely to have had serious consequences for mortality levels... the combination of low levels of sanitation and people living in close proximity, creating a perfect environment for infectious diseases of all kinds (Scobie, 1986; Scheidel, 2003).
To make matters worse, Roman cities were not isolated islands in a rural sea, but were hubs in a network of travel and transport.... The Mediterranean not only made the Roman Empire a geographically integrated economy, but also created the first integrated disease regime.... The Romans built an unprecedented network of roads.... Roman cities had become the focal point of viruses and bacteria that all vectored in on them, to find a densely packed population.... Romans paid a price for their wealth with a deterioration of their health...
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