The Science of Roman History: Biology, Climate, and the Future of the Past

by Walter Scheidel (Editor)

How the latest cutting-edge science offers a fuller picture of life in Rome and antiquity

This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive look at how the latest advances in the sciences are transforming our understanding of ancient Roman history. Walter Scheidel brings together leading historians, anthropologists, and geneticists at the cutting edge of their fields, who explore novel types of evidence that enable us to reconstruct the realities of life in the Roman world.

Contributors discuss climate change and its impact on Roman history, and then cover botanical and animal remains, which cast new light on agricultural and dietary practices. They exploit the rich record of human skeletal material--both bones and teeth--which forms a bio-archive that has preserved vital information about health, nutritional status, diet, disease, working conditions, and migration. Complementing this discussion is an in-depth analysis of trends in human body height, a marker of general well-being. This book also assesses the contribution of genetics to our understanding of the past, demonstrating how ancient DNA is used to track infectious diseases, migration, and the spread of livestock and crops, while the DNA of modern populations helps us reconstruct ancient migrations, especially colonization.

Opening a path toward a genuine biohistory of Rome and the wider ancient world, The Science of Roman History offers an accessible introduction to the scientific methods being used in this exciting new area of research, as well as an up-to-date survey of recent findings and a tantalizing glimpse of what the future holds.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ancient History, Science, Biology

280 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2019

About the author

Dickason Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Classics and History
Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Scheidel's research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He is particularly interested in connecting the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences.

Reviews

[Bonnie_blu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of academic papers that examine various fields in the exploration of Roman history and how the hard sciences are contributing to these explorations. The authors of the papers consistently stress the importance of "cross pollination" among historians, anthropologists, archeologists, geneticists, biochemists, zoologists, botanists, and all scientists. While I am impressed with the advances that have been gained in understanding the Roman world by including the hard sciences, I can't help but think that's it's about time, and ask what took so long?

[Shrike58 · Rating 3 out of 5]

File Under: Assigned graduate reading. If one is a general reader you have very little reason to pick up this collection of essays. While the editor may be offering this book as a "snapshot" of new and interesting avenues of research, I suspect that the main value might be the bibliographies of the assorted essays, as they provide a "tour de horizon" of the assorted topics. That said, I did find the offerings dealing with climate on one hand, and tracking migratory patterns by genetics on the other, interesting enough to be worth my time; your mileage may differ.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

A couple of short papers laying out promising new(ish) avenues of research into classical history—through climate, paleobotany, zooarchaeology, various previously underserved aspects of bones, ``classical'' DNA research, and (sigh) population genetics—be they due to interesting new techniques or just changing fashions among archaeologists. Some of it is clearly bullshit (not just the population genetics), but it's gratifying to see bullshit still consistently signposts itself as such through abuse of jargon and TLAs, and much of the rest does seem to show great potential to produce more nuanced microhistories that could, in time, be synthesised into new actual understanding. There are some tentative results here already, but mainly the point of the book is to make you optimistic about the near future (of classical archaeology), and it does.

[Fathin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good intro into the various hard disciplines that are used for historical research. Because of the focus on the methodology of these disciplines (e.g., historical and modern DNA research, historical climate science, historical anthropology, archeobotany and archeozoology) in most of the chapters, including a discussion of the methodological problems and pitfalls, most of the chapters can be used for teaching. Some would be more palatable with more case studies to illustrate the application of the method to Ancient Mediterranean (archeobotany, archeozoology). Others could be improved with more methodological discussion (in particular the chapter on historical climate science) and with a more nuanced presentation including controversies and discrepancies in modern research (both cllimate science and modern population analysis).

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Science of Roman History offers an academic snapshot in time of what new methods have to offer historians and archaeologists. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2019...

[Zoran Cupic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book offer basically a modern scientific look on archaeology of Roman period.
Bit dry to read but interesting nonetheless.

[Bob Croft · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Review)

[∂ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty uneven collection of essays in terms of focus, style, and arguments. Some were exceptionally good, others wandered away from the main themes of the book.