Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 397
According to Giovannini the cemeteries of post-Roman Italy reveal healthy
populations whose bones show little wear and tear of the kind associated with
gruelling agrarian labour, and few signs of endemic disease and malnutrition.
Quite unlike the teeth and bones that tend to come from similar rural sites
of imperial date, the post-classical skeletons from several sites belonged to
women and men who ate food sufficient in quantity, quality, and variety, and
who worked less and suffered fewer illnesses than their Roman ancestors. Only
a cemetery near Piana degli Albanesi in Sicily surrendered 5th-century human
remains with ‘classical’ levels of pathology and malnutrition, which Giovannini
attributed to the island’s more solid political and social structure—to Rome’s
failure to ‘fall’ fast enough there.25 As became clear from the enamel on teeth,
the porousness of crania, and body size, other late antique people at Castro dei
Volsci, Savona, and Aosta had established measurably better ecological rela-
tions with the places they inhabited than one might expect from measuring
human societies’ success purely by total numbers of individuals on the ground.
Moreover, low incidences of child mortality and the sex ratios of the mature
dead suggested to Giovannini that in early medieval rural communities birth
rates were kept artificially low by delaying marriage, by prolonged breast-
feeding and other means, so as to challenge the stereotyped assumption of
miserable post-classical populations crushed by high death rates and ‘natu-
ral’ rates of reproduction, governed only by physiological fecundity. Instead,
late Roman people in the rural and small-town locales investigated by
Giovannini were few because cultural choices kept them that way, and also
perhaps kept them happy.
A 2007 critique of Giovannini’s rose-tinted demography by Barbiero and
Dalla Zuanna confirmed some of his analysis but also refined his assertions
by considerably expanding the database.26 Though the information is by defi-
nition statistically inconclusive because it was based on limited case studies,
one can explain the few child burials that Giovannini thought to be a sign
of low child mortality rates by cultural customs (funerary age segregation),
and the life expectancy of early medieval Italians may not have improved by
20 per cent as Giovannini argued.27 In fact the growth of rural population,
particularly in the Po Valley in the two centuries after 800 that Barbiero and
Della Zuanna emphasize, coincided with a lowering of mortality, a consequent
25 Giovannini, Natalità, pp. 74–5.
26 Barbiera/Dalla Zuanna, “Le dinamiche”, pp. 19–42.
27 Spina/Canci, “Ferento (VT)”, p. 330, found high numbers of infant bodies in a Latial 6–7th-
century cemetery (42.6 per cent of the total), and were rightly puzzled by the unusual
finding (n.20).