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Bodies of Work: Understanding the Roman Lower Class
Kristina Killgrove, University of North Carolina

As the modern city of Rome continually expands its boundaries, new archaeological remains have come to light in the suburbium of ancient Rome. Between 2000 and 2001, road construction in the area of Casal Bertone (1.5 km from Porta Maggiore) unearthed human skeletal remains, enumerating 70 individuals from a necropolis and 39 individuals from an adjacent tricameral mausoleum, dating to the middle imperial period (second-third century A.D.). Many of the graves in the necropolis were of the cappuccina type, a style popular among the lower social classes and slaves, and few grave goods were found. Both burial areas included men, women, and children of a variety of ages. Although our past understanding of the daily lives of lower-class Romans was based mostly on texts written by elites, osteological analysis offers an alternative way to investigate how the average Roman dealt with environmental stress in both the cultural and ecological senses. Daily work routines can become imprinted on the body through repetitive movements, division of labor can be seen in differences among the bodies of males, females, and children, and disease ecology can be reconstructed from pathology of teeth and bones. In this paper, I explore how the osteological bodies from the Casal Bertone necropolis and mausoleum inform us about the stress of working for a living in Imperial Rome.

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