Funding Needs in Classical Bioarchaeology
by Kristina Killgrove, Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology (University of West Florida)
Working between the fields of anthropology and classics isn’t easy. The gulf between the fields is historical – both in terms of the divergent development of the disciplines in the U.S. and in terms of their use of historical records to inform research questions. But since I’ve wanted to study ancient skeletons from the time I first cracked open Biers’ The Archaeology of Greece, procured at a used college textbook store and my prized possession as a middle schooler, I knew that bridging that divide was important. The coursework was not a problem. I bounced between classics and anthropology with relative ease, gaining experience with human remains, anthropological theory, and classical archaeology and languages. The funding for this type of work – classical bioarchaeology – is more difficult to procure, though.
Funding issues first arose for me in my PhD program. It wasn’t just that funding was hard to find, but that many reviewers saw the union of classics and anthropology as pointless. In the reviews I got back on one grant application, I was called naïve in my insistence that these two fields could mesh; I was told that my proposal wasn’t anthropological because I addressed the historical sources from ancient Rome; and I was informed that classical archaeology was a substandard form of archaeology. Although I was eventually successful in getting dissertation funding from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, it was a hard-won battle. So when I looked to fund my first post-PhD research project, I turned to crowdfunding, raising thousands of dollars from the general public who saw the combination of ancient Rome, DNA, and human skeletons as exciting.
Crowdfunding is insufficient, though, to mount the sort of large-scale excavation or complete the detailed biochemical analyses necessary to plumb the depths of our understanding of the ancient Romans. That’s why government-funded agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities are key to the continued progress in classical archaeology. And thankfully, reviewers’ opinions have begun to change in the last decade since I began my work in Roman bioarchaeology.
My new research project, launching this summer, focuses on several dozen skeletons from Oplontis. Funding that I received from the NEH in the form of a Summer Stipend is crucial to the success of the first phase of the project: creating 3D and photogrammetric models of the bodies still in situ and collecting a slew of osteological data on all of the skeletons. One of the questions regarding these infamous deaths in 79 AD is the exact mechanism: were people killed by inhaling ash, which essentially turned into cement in their lungs, suffocating them? Or were they flash-fried from the heat of the eruption, stopping their hearts? While I don’t know if I’ll be able to solve this or not based on the position of the bodies, being able to record and pore over the models of the skeletons is necessary for both conservation purposes and for an attempt at determining cause of death. The other questions I’m asking in this first phase are demographic and pathological: who are these people and what diseases did they have? Data collection from skeletal markers will help me understand their age-at-death, sex, stature, and the pathological conditions they suffered from as kids as well as before their untimely deaths.
But even though this is a comparatively small project – just 54 skeletons – funding needs don’t end there. While osteological data collection tells you about demographics and pathology, biochemical analysis can reveal hidden information about diet, migration, and genetics. What’s especially cool about skeletons is that they don’t just represent a moment in time. Because different cells turn over at different rates, the human body is a time capsule of information: testing enamel the first molar gives you information from right around the person’s birth, while the third molar doesn’t start forming until about 12 years of age. And although bones turn over, some do more quickly than others: this means that testing a rib for dietary isotopes may provide a different result than testing a femur. Evidence of certain childhood diseases can also leave a permanent mark on the skeleton in the form of pitting of the dental enamel or lines of growth arrest in the leg bones.
So why should the general public – whose tax dollars fund the NSF and NEH – care about a few dozen dead Romans? In the case of this project, because they can give us information about how humans physically and culturally adapted to a catastrophic environmental event: not the volcanic eruption, but the earthquake of 62 AD. That event famously left its mark on Pompeii, Oplontis, and other sites that had not yet fully rebuilt by 79 AD. Homes were destroyed, aqueducts compromised, the grain supply disrupted. How did these infrastructural issues affect the people living there? There’s osteological evidence that Herculaneum suffered a population dip following the earthquake. Is there at Oplontis? More importantly, in looking at people who were late teenagers or in their early 20s when they died in 79 AD, what can we say about their childhoods just after the earthquake? Is there evidence of growth arrest of enamel or bone? Did their dietary isotopes shift because of changes in the food web? The combination of physical and cultural responses to this catastrophe in the Bay of Naples is an intriguing research question that allows me to get at climate change in a uniquely narrow time frame in the past.
For research such as mine, that requires funding on the scale of tens of thousands of dollars for smaller projects and a couple hundred thousand for larger ones, the money available through governmental organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities is unparalleled. Producing new information about ancient bodies serves not only to fill in the gaps of the historical record but also to teach us different ways past people solved problems, many of which may be relevant to today. There is much more we can learn from the Romans, but only if continued funding from NEH and NSF remains available to archaeologists.
More June, 2017 Newsletter Content
For Helen Cullyer's statement about the history of NEH funding at the SCS, see this page.
For Casey Dué's piece about the Homer Multitext Project, read her article here.
For Peter Meineck's call for strong NEH funding and his experience with Aquilla Theatre, follow this link.
For a list of resources you can use to learn more about proposed NEH funding cuts and how to get involved, check out this page.
