Roman occupation of Britain damaged the population’s health

The health of the British population deteriorated under Roman occupation, particularly in more urban areas.

There is a widely held belief that the Romans brought civilization and its many benefits to those they conquered, perhaps the best example being that of The Life of Brian from Monty Pythonin which John Cleese’s character Reg asks: “Apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, law and order, irrigation, roads, fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans done for us?”

Yet researchers have known for at least a decade that there was a decline in population health in Iron Age Britain after the Romans conquered the territory in AD 43 – and that populations thrived after their departure.

Now, Rebecca Pitt from the University of Reading, UK, studied 646 ancient skeletons, 372 from children younger than 3.5 years old at the time of death, as well as 274 from adult women aged 18 to 45. These came from 24 Iron Age and Romano-British sites in southern and central England, dating from four centuries before the arrival of the Romans until the fourth century AD, when they withdrew.

Pitt estimated the ages of individuals based on pelvic characteristics in adults and teeth in children. She said jointly examining the experiences of potential mothers and their children should provide better insight into the stressors affecting different generations under Roman occupation.

“Environmental exposures during critical periods of early development can have lasting effects on an individual’s health,” says Pitt, just as a mother’s health can influence that of a child.

Pitt examined the bones and teeth and looked for abnormalities such as lesions or fractures that might indicate tuberculosis, osteomyelitis, or dental disease. She also used X-rays to examine the internal structures of bones, which can reveal changes in bone development caused by malnutrition or deficiencies of vitamins C and D.

This revealed that the negative health impacts of Roman occupation were concentrated in the two largest urban centers in the study: the Roman administrative towns of Venta Belgarum, now Winchester, and Corinium Dobunnorum or Cirencester.

Overall, 81% of urban Roman adults had bone abnormalities, compared to 62% of Iron Age people, but Iron Age and rural Roman cohorts did not differ significantly. And only 26 percent of Iron Age children showed such effects, compared with 41 percent in rural Roman settlements and 61 percent in urban Roman sites.

“One of the things that was really apparent in urban non-adults was rickets, meaning people didn’t have enough access to vitamin D from the sun,” Pitt says.

She suggests that these health effects, which lasted for many generations, were due to the new diseases the Romans brought with them as well as the class divisions and infrastructure they introduced, which led to limited access to resources for those lower on the social ladder and crowded and polluted living conditions.

“My father always jokes about Brian’s lifebut the Romans had a pretty negative impact on our health, which affected several generations,” says Pitt.

Martin Millett, of the University of Cambridge, says the finding is interesting and that the effect might even be underestimated if the people buried were those of higher status who might have been healthier, but he doesn’t think it’s necessarily an urban effect.

“These urban centers are not huge medieval cities with great poverty and enormous densities,” he says. “What we may be seeing is a growing differentiation between rich and poor. The Roman Empire had an economic and social system that meant the difference between rich and poor grew over time.”

Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University, UK, also says that the legacy of the Romans did not benefit everyone equally. “There was more know-how in hygiene, sanitation and medicine, but access to that knowledge? That’s a whole different matter,” he says. “The reality is that not everyone benefited from it and it took a while for it to trickle down to different elements of society. »