Diet and differentiation in the Roman province of Macedonia: a bioarchaeological approach
This study used dietary data obtained through macroscopic and stable isotope analysis to explore the influence of the local micro-ecology, social status, sex, and/or age on the dietary choices of the inhabitants of two distinct but contemporaneous communities of ‘commoners’ in Roman Macedonia. The palaeopathological results for Pontokomi-Vrysi suggest a resilient community, relying for its subsistence on agriculture, with less strictly defined gender-based social roles when it comes to consumption and more differentiated when it comes to labor, possibly on the basis of physical strength and/or societal prescriptions. In addition, the isotopic results for Pontokomi-Vrysi and Nea Kerdylia-Strovolos show important inter-site dietary differences but no sex and age intra-community differences. These results support a C3 plant-based diet for both communities with the protein content, however, deriving from the consumption of different in their isotopic values domestic plants and animals. This difference is due to region-specific environmental parameters and anthropogenic disturbances practiced within the agro-pastoral economic spectrum characterizing the two communities, influenced, in their turn, by each region’s micro-ecological features. The isotopic results also complement the ones of the oral health study conducted for the Pontokomi-Vrysi assemblage, supporting the absence of age- or gender-based food hierarchies in the household domain of Roman ‘commoners’. Despite limitations, this study shows the potential bioarchaeology holds to elucidate aspects of the social history of the ‘common’ people of the past and enhanced our understanding of the dynamics that gave to the socio-cultural map of Macedonia its particular ‘color’ after its incorporation into the Roman Empire.