The “Health Problem” in Roman Economic History: A Prolegomenon

This article examines how Roman-period health has been studied by economic historians. Human skeletons have long been interrogated as proxy data for economic performance. Given the lacuna of other quantified data, the human body has proven a particularly tempting medium for questions of nutrition, inequality and other economic metrics. Often left aside in both Roman-period and longer economic-historical analyses are the multiple etiologies of different skeletal pathologies. Using a large dataset of Italian Roman-period skeletons, this article highlights the non-correspondence of most such metrics at the cemetery level, and thus the difficulties of reading clear economic indicators from the body. It instead highlights the highly heterogeneous nature of Roman populations as regards both frailty and resilience, and thus the importance of integrating individual osteobiographies into broader population-level studies.