Modeling Health during Societal Collapse: Can Recent History Help Our Understanding of Post-Roman Gaul?

Abstract

Societal collapse results in structural breakdowns and instability, which can affect life expectancy and population health. Previous bioarchaeological studies have, however, sometimes struggled to identify correlations between sociopolitical changes and skeletal indicators of morbidity and mortality. Late Antiquity (ca. 300–700 CE) has often been conceptualized as a period of sociopolitical rupture marked by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the transition to the medieval period. The nature of this transition and whether it was marked by either catastrophic or more gradual change has been much debated. To date, bioarchaeological analysis has contributed little to these discussions. A model of the effects of societal collapse on health is generated from a modern example (the Soviet Union) and used to assess the bioarchaeological evidence. While contextually far removed from the Roman Empire, the Soviet Union is the only example of a large-scale union of multiple countries for which clinical data relating to its collapse are available. Femoral lengths and height-for-age Z-scores from non-adult and adult skeletal remains (269 individuals) from northern and southern Gaul are analyzed as a proxy for health. Contrary to the Soviet model, results indicate a period of greater physiological stress during the Gallo-Roman period than the later transition. Differences in growth patterns suggest social and cultural factors rooted in Roman lifeways were manufacturing a non-traditional distribution of biological vulnerability.