Health and wealth in the Roman Empire

Willem M. Jongman, Jan Jacobs and Geertje M. Klein Goldewijk

Economics & Human Biology, 2019, vol. 34, issue C, 138-150

Abstract: Ancient Rome was the largest and most populous empire of its time, and the largest pre-industrial state in European history. Recent though not universally accepted research suggests that at least for the most populous central periods of its history standard of living was also rather higher than before or after. To trace whether this is also reflected in Roman biological standard of living, we present the first large and more or less comprehensive dataset, based on skeletal data for some 10,000 individuals, covering all periods of Roman history, and all regions (even if inevitably unequally). We discuss both the methodologies that we developed and the historical results. Instead of reconstructing heights from the long bones assuming fixed body proportions or from one individual long bone, we apply exploratory factor analysis and calculate factor scores for 50-year periods. Our measure of the biological standard of living declined during the last two centuries B.C. and started to improve again, slowly at first, from the second century A.D. It correlated negatively with population, but also with other aspects of standard of living such as wages or diets.

Keywords: Biological standard of living; Roman Empire; skeleton remains (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 C82 N01 N33 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:34:y:2019:i:c:p:138-150

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2019.01.005

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