- Geof Kron –
in bones, either zinc and strontium (an older and arguably less reliable method, given
the tendency of these minerals to leach into or out of bones based on soil conditions) or
stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in order to determine the importance of protein,
whether herbivorous meat or marine sources, can be very informative in supplementing
and explaining height data, and are adding a great deal to our understanding of the
relatively rich Greco-Roman diet (Prowse et al. 2004; Fornaciari and Mallegni 1987; Kron
2012a), but few such studies have been carried out for Etruscan sites. One strontium/zinc
analysis (Fornaciari and Mallegni 1987) suggests a fairly rich agricultural diet, slightly
less rich than at Athens, but consistent with our height evidence, which likewise suggests
nearly comparable levels of protein in the Etruscan diet. One of our few isotope studies
(Scarabino et al. 2006) argues that their results suggest a largely vegetable or cereal diet,
but their methodology is weak, failing to study the carbon and nitrogen isotope signatures
in contemporaneous domestic animals, or to properly put the results into the context of
other sites. Seen in this light, their results are, in fact, not inconsistent with a signifi cant
amount of meat in the diet, albeit mainly from herbivores rather than sea fi sh. Another
isotope study (Calabrisotto et al. 2009) from Populonia, dating from the second century
ad, based on radiocarbon dating and the fi nd of a coin of Marcus Aurelius, and therefore
unfortunately rather unhelpful to us, shows high meat and fi sh consumption. They estimate
up to 30 percent of the protein in the diet may come from marine fi sh, and the rich grave
goods, and relatively good height of 172 cm for the male, certainly make this credible.
One of the great advantages of anthropometric evidence over many crude measures
of economic development, such as global estimates of GNP per capita, is its sensitivity
to often subtle changes in mass living standards and changes in social inequality,
which might otherwise be obscured by the prosperity of small elites. For example, the
signifi cant increase in social inequality in much of the United States over the latter half
of the nineteenth century, concomitant with northern industrialization, urbanization and
the backlash against southern reconstruction, is refl ected in a very signifi cant decline
in American mean heights from well over 172 cm in Colonial times, to around 168 cm
by circa 1900 (see Kron 2005: 70–1). While statistical evidence for increasing wealth
inequality picks up this social transformation (Williamson & Lindert 1980), most
economic historians would surely have argued that this remained a period of signifi cant
economic growth. Signifi cantly, such anthropometric evidence, like that documenting
poor English living standards during the industrial revolution, or the steep secular
decline in Italian living standards over the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see
Kron forthcoming), is much more fi nely attuned to the actual effects of social changes as
well as gross economic output.
Likewise, careful attention to differences in mean fi nal height gives us some potential
to identify and compare trends in social inequality, prosperity and poverty in Etruscan
and Roman society. The data suggests, if we supplement it with housing data and other
indications of likely wealth and income distribution and economic development, as I can
only sketch briefl y here, that Etruscan society may well have been closer to that of the
Greeks, less conservative and inegalitarian than that of Republican and Imperial Rome,
just as it was radically different from nineteenth-century Europe.
While many modern scholars suspect that Etruscan society was highly inegalitarian,
some suspect it was even more so than Roman society after its confl ict of the orders
(Harris 1971: 114–29; Cornell 1995), their claims are far from conclusive. This theory
is based heavily on the social confl icts between rich and poor allegedly exploited by the