These Old Bones: An Osteobiography of an Archaic Cemetery at Agia Paraskevi, Thessaloniki

This chapter examines the farmer’s experience of agricultural production through an osteobiographical analysis of a sixth century BCE rural community at Agia Paraskevi. Agriculture is an evergreen topic in economic discourse, especially economic performance measured in yields, land suitability, and labor capacity metrics. A farmer’s labor underpinned economic performance, and instead of reflecting on their experience of labor, we often assign farmers to abstract sociohistorical (e.g., slave, citizen) or economic (e.g., poor, wealthy) categories. Such categories are helpful for us to quantify agricultural production but less so in measuring the physical experience of farming and the toll manual labor had on the body. This chapter explores this gap in our knowledge by examining the skeletal data of a rural community to generate osteobiographies of their working lives. Entheseal change and osteoarthritis are discussed as markers of manual labor, and the chapter assesses the patterns of wear on the male and female skeleton samples as potential indicators of the types of labor each sex performed. Differences in labor patterns based on sex are compared to other osteobiographical samples beyond antiquity and the Mediterranean to understand how men and women carried out rural labor. The conclusions explore the experience of agricultural labor and, by extension, economic performance from the individual's perspective to learn more about the human cost of the agricultural economy.