The Science of Roman History: Biology, Climate, and the Future of the Past

Walter Scheidel (ed). (2018). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

A key idea running throughout this volume is the necessity to understand natural history in order to understand human history and vice versa. There is also great emphasis on the value of interdisciplinary engagement between environmental scientists and historians, between textual and scientific data. Each chapter focusses on a different method for approaching Roman interaction with the world around them, moving from macro-narratives told with evidence gathered from the natural world and its climate (Chapter 1), plants (Chapter 2) and animals (Chapter 3) to micro-narratives gathered from individual human bodies through study of bones and teeth (Chapter 4), growth (Chapter 5) and DNA (Chapters 6 & 7). All of these approaches provide evidence on how people and their food travelled around the many different landscapes included in the Roman Empire as well as how these interactions changed over time, often providing evidence for societal groups (e.g. children) whose lived experiences are hardly recorded in surviving textual evidence, thus providing a much more holistic overview of roman societies.

Example quotation

it is worth emphasizing here that I regard plants recovered from archaeological excavations as a form of material culture, shaped by and shaping their interactions with people, to be studied in a similar fashion to and alongside other lines of evidence, including faunal remains, human remains, isotopes, ceramics, tools, buildings, and texts. Each dataset has its own strengths and weaknesses, and only by combining all the available evidence are we likely to get nearer to the many and varied realities of the past.

(p.54)