A new study has revealed that the Roman occupation of Britain damaged the health of the population. From then on, it declined for several generations – particularly in the most urbanized areas.
There is a widely held belief that the Romans brought civilization and its many benefits to the people they conquered.
However, investigators know that a declining health of the population of Iron Age Britain after the Romans conquered the territory in AD 43..
A new study, last week in Antiquityanalyzed 646 ancient skeletons, 372 belonging to children who were under 3.5 years old when they died, as well as 274 from adult women aged between 18 and 45. These came from 24 Iron Age and Romano-British sites across southern and central England, dating from four centuries before the arrival of the Romans until the fourth century AD, when they withdrew.
The team examined the bones and teeth and looked for abnormalities such as lesions or fractures that could indicate tuberculosis, osteomyelitis or dental disease. He also used x-rays to look at the internal structures of bones, which can reveal changes in the way bones develop caused by malnutrition or vitamin C and D deficiencies.
The analysis revealed that the negative impacts of the Roman occupation on health were concentrated in the two largest urban centers in the study — the Roman administrative cities of Venta Belgarum, currently Winchesterfrom Corinium Dobunnorum, ou Cirencester.
As details, in total, 81% of urban Roman adults had bone anomalies, compared with 62% of people dating back to the Iron Age, but the Iron Age groups and rural Romans did not differ significantly. And only 26 percent of Iron Age children showed such effects, compared with 41 percent of those living in rural Roman settlements and 61 percent in urban Roman sites.
“One of the things that was really evident in urban non-adults was the ricketswhich means that people were not having enough access to vitamin D from sunlight”, the study leader told the same magazine, Rebecca Pittfrom the University of Reading, in the United Kingdom.
Pitt suggests that these health effects, which lasted for many generations, were due to new diseases that the Romans brought with themas well as the class divisions and infrastructure they introduced, resulting in limited access to resources for those lower down the social hierarchy and in overcrowded and polluted living situations.
