Dietary Pathologies and Isotope Diversity in Imperial Rome (First to Fourth Centuries AD)

Variation in the everyday diet of people in Imperial Rome cannot be captured by historical records alone and requires synthesis of archaeological context and biochemical data from human skeletons. This chapter examines correlations between paleodietary isotope data and dental pathology frequencies from three Imperial-period cemetery sites in Rome, Italy, against a backdrop of historical information about foodways and oral hygiene practices. These lines of evidence provide a glimpse into a population that was consuming a mostly vegetarian diet, reliant on wheat bread and on protein from poultry, eggs, and pork, and that had moderate dental health. Individual data sets, however, are clearly insufficient to capture the range of variation in this most important of social symbols: food. The enduring challenge in Roman dietary studies is to tease out patterns in the evidence in order to arrive at a better understanding of dietary variation and its link to the dynamics of life course and social status.