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Saturday 15 April 2023 11.00 - 13.00
I-14 ANT09 Material and Cultural Approaches
B34
Network: Antiquity Chair: Neville Morley
Organizers: - Discussants: -
Thomas Leibundgut : The Bioarchaeology of Ancient Migration
Modern discourses and practices of migration are highly gendered: from gender-specific labour migration to the question of who is perceived as a legitimate refugee, the gender of movers and migrants is one of their defining features. With regard to Graeco-Roman antiquity, gender has not only substantially shaped ancient discourses of ... (Show more)
Modern discourses and practices of migration are highly gendered: from gender-specific labour migration to the question of who is perceived as a legitimate refugee, the gender of movers and migrants is one of their defining features. With regard to Graeco-Roman antiquity, gender has not only substantially shaped ancient discourses of migration (Lo Cascio and Tacoma 2016), but also contemporary scholars' perception of who migrated how for what reason, often conceptualising ancient migration as an overwhelmingly male phenomenon, given that women migrants are rather scarce in ancient texts, papyri and inscriptions (Woolf 2013).
While written records give us a unique perspective into the reasons for individuals and small groups to migrate, the best evidence for actual migration are the physical remains of migrants themselves. Human remains, while also problematic in some respects, are not easily influenced by the cultural superstructure, even though socio-cultural attitudes and notions as well as diet have a significant potential to physically alter skeletal remains. Thus, bioarchaeological approaches, particularly isotope analyses of bones and dental enamel, provide valuable insight into whether an individual was born in the vicinity of where they died, or had moved there at some time during their life (Killgrove 2018, Leppard et al. 2020).
In my paper, I present the results of a wide-ranging meta-analysis of bioarchaeological studies focusing on migration in the western Roman Empire. Having analysed more than 60 studies with a total sample size of more than 2000 individuals, covering a broad range of time, space, site-types, body parts analysed, and isotopes used for analysis, it seems that women were in fact about as likely to move as men, given that the proportion of women among the entire sample population is virtually the same as among the migrant population. What is more, the gender ratio remains roughly the same no matter how the data was grouped, with most cases falling within one standard deviation from the mean. While there are some outliers (e.g. the city of Rome, where there are indeed much fewer migrant women than men), they do not influence the overall result in a statistically significant way.
In sum, while there seem to have been slightly more men migrating than women, the difference is much smaller than previously thought, albeit with significant regional differences.

Bibliography
Killgrove, Kristina (2018). ‘Bioarchaeology in the Roman Empire’. In: Smith, Claire (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of Global Archaeology. Second Edition, New York NY: Springer, pp. 876–882.
Leppard, Thomas P. et al. (2020). ‘The Bioarchaeology of Migration in the Ancient Mediterranean: Meta-Analysis of Radiogenic (87Sr/86Sr) Isotope Ratios’. In: Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 33/2, pp. 211–241.
Lo Cascio, Elio and Tacoma, Laurens E. (2016). ‘Writing Migration’. In: Lo Cascio, Elio and Tacoma, Laurens E. (Eds.), The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire. Leiden: Brill, pp. 1–24.
Woolf, Greg (2013). ‘Female Mobility in the Roman West’. In: Hemelrijk, Emily and Woolf, Greg (Eds.), Women and the Roman City in the Latin West. Leiden and Boston MA: Brill, pp. 351–368. (Show less)

Laurie Venters : Filthy Ditch Diggers: Unfree Spadework in Latin Verse
The penned worlds of Rome’s Latin poets are abound with archetypes. From wretched slaves to capricious aristocrats, early imperial verse boasts a rich array of personalities. While poetry cannot be considered an exact window onto ancient society, stanzas recording aspects of quotidian life remain invaluable to the study of social ... (Show more)
The penned worlds of Rome’s Latin poets are abound with archetypes. From wretched slaves to capricious aristocrats, early imperial verse boasts a rich array of personalities. While poetry cannot be considered an exact window onto ancient society, stanzas recording aspects of quotidian life remain invaluable to the study of social history. For scholars of slavery, the genres of lyric, elegy and epigram are particularly enlightening, preserving details of the slave experience otherwise lost to posterity. Among the varicoloured vignettes of Rome’s gold and silver age poets skulks a cryptic figure, the servus fossor, or rather, slave ditch digger. Perpetually filthy and frequently clad in shackles, bonded diggers find few parallels in other literary or epigraphic sources, suggesting their especial lowliness in the servile hierarchy. The opacity regarding the labour undertaken by slave ditch diggers is somewhat lost in English translation. In fact, many aspects of the life and work of servi fossori remain obscure, having so far escaped the notice of researchers. As such, this article aims to ascertain the range of jobs performed by slave diggers, locate the occupational spheres in which they toiled, and ask to what degree can the study of servi fossori enrich our understanding of unfree labour in antiquity. Foremost, it is necessary to uncover the particular nuances of the noun fossor (“a person who digs”). Through cross referencing different usages of the term –– variously employed to mean “miner” or, in military contexts, “sapper” –– we might pinpoint the precise meaning of fosser as conveyed by the poets. Secondly, it is warranted to compare servi fossori alongside other known groups of slave workmen, particularly those engaged on the villa rustica. A final mention is owed to the physical conditions accompanying bonded spadework. Several of the lyricists depict servi fossori in heavy chains, requiring us to discern literary fiction from casual observance. Recent decades have witnessed a general backlash against the notion Roman agricultural slaves worked in irons, though the poetic evidence potentially complicates definite conclusions. (Show less)

Arjan Zuiderhoek : Empire and the limits of exploitation in the Roman world
Did wealth and power neatly coincide in premodern states? Historians and social scientists often write as if this was the case. In this paper, however, I argue (taking the Roman empire of the Principate, especially its eastern part, as a case study) that the structural characteristics of premodern empire could ... (Show more)
Did wealth and power neatly coincide in premodern states? Historians and social scientists often write as if this was the case. In this paper, however, I argue (taking the Roman empire of the Principate, especially its eastern part, as a case study) that the structural characteristics of premodern empire could actually place significant limits on the possibilities for elite predation, both at the level of the relationships between imperial centre and provincial periphery, and at the level of the relationships between local civic elites and their urban constituencies. Elite wealth accumulation was necessarily tempered by the empire’s decentralized administrative structures and the elite’s desire to be seen to exercise power legitimately.
(Show less)



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