INTRODUCTION

How well or poorly nourished people are can lead to changes in the bones. So study of the skeleton can give indications about the food consumed. This chapter explores the sort of information that can be gathered. It will look at the biases in the record and at how rich and poor diets may manifest themselves. This information will then be used to explore the nutritional history of various late Roman communities.

Human bones suffer from the same limitations with respect to preservation as animal bones do. Any inhumation cemetery on acid soil will not preserve skeletons. An even more important bias is to do with chronology. Many communities in the earlier Roman period cremated their dead. Though it is now possible to gain much useful information from cremated remains regarding the age, sex, and pathological conditions of the deceased, this is a relatively new departure in Romano-British studies. The bulk of the cremated dead have never been examined in this way. Most information comes from people who were inhumed. Inhumation became increasingly popular as time progressed, and much of our evidence stems from the third and fourth centuries. Inhumation was practised earlier, and some people were still being cremated in the fourth century; but we know far more about the nutritional health of the later Roman population than we do about that of the people of the later Iron Age and early Roman period.