- Geof Kron –
skeleton are arthritic conditions, particularly common on the vertebral spine, which is
generally vulnerable to damage, including cleft atlas, spina bifi da of the sacrum and
sacralization of the fi fth lumbar spine, but also found in hip, elbow, shoulder and knee
(Brasili Gualandi et al. 1997). Most of the pathological changes are related to aging
or occupational causes, particularly the stress of relatively heavy work or repetitive
movement, as have been very effectively explored in a detailed study by Alessandra
Sperduti (1997). Studying the traces of over-development of the points of tendon
attachment reveals not only injuries from overwork, but also can be helpful, along with
analysis of the robusticity of bones (as, e.g. in Rubini 1996), in pinpointing muscular
development. Such evidence could also potentially allow conjectures about likely body
mass index, which is as signifi cant as height as an indicator of likely health and life
expectancy, but far more diffi cult to determine using physical anthropology. Evidence
for physical training and a heavy musculature can be pointed out from one study of one
well-built Roman soldier (Erc 26) killed in Herculaneum (Bisel and Bisel 2002: 468)
and another athlete or body builder (Erc 86) from the same town (Laurence 2005: 88).
Osteoporosis, like arthritis, is an important health ailment, particularly for women,
which can be documented using skeletal remains, and a very full recent study, again of a
Roman rather than Etruscan site (Cho and Stuart 2011), reveals that the progress of the
syndrome, at least for the tolerably well-off working and middle class population buried
in Isola Sacra, is fairly typical of that normally found in modern studies (Cho & Stuart
2011: 12–13). Although the diffi culty of accurately aging skeletal remains tends to make
demographic conclusions from physical anthropology unreliable, this recent work on
osteoporosis, along with an important observation identifying a large number of cases of
a syndrome peculiar to post-menopausal women in skeletal remains from Pompeii (Lazer
2009: 153) suggests that life expectancy in Roman populations, and also presumably
Etruscan and Greek populations, was likely to be signifi cantly greater than is sometimes
assumed from uncritical use of evidence of high infant mortality and poor life expectancy
using nineteenth century comparative evidence (see Kron forthcoming c). Of course,
our insight into ancient levels of infant mortality is severely limited by the custom of
interring neo-nates and many children, and, in the case of the Etruscans, probably all who
died at ages of less than around fi ve and a half, in different locations from adults and older
children (Becker 2007; 2012), and by our general failure, with the striking exception of
the discovery of a massive children’s cemetery at Astypalaia in Greece (Hillson 2009), to
identify signifi cant numbers of child burials.
The most signifi cant and generally reliable evidence of overall levels of health and
nutrition, however, come from anthropometric studies of mean fi nal height, as has been
extensively demonstrated in a massive modern anthropometric literature investigating
the secular increase in height in Western Europe over the past two centuries, and in
detailed studies of under-nutrition, ill-health, debility and reduced life expectancy
worldwide (references in Kron 2005). Although some communities, such as the isolated
mountain dwellers of Molise or the Apennines, already identifi ed above with high
levels of LEH and cribra orbitalia, clearly suffered signifi cantly higher levels of under-
nutrition, as did many chattel slaves and immigrants, and the poor, on the whole, Greco-
Roman fi nal heights suggest a signifi cantly better level of nutrition and health than
that experienced by the working classes of Western Europe prior to the mid-twentieth
century for most countries (references in Kron 2005; Kron 2012b). Many nineteenth
century European populations, most notably the Austrians and Spanish, were fed on a