This is an aerial photo of the Portus Project excavations in 2009. Credit: Portus Project
Posted on 06/14/2019 12:15:11 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Portus Romae was established in the middle of the first century AD and for well over 400 years was Rome's gateway to the Mediterranean...
Lead author, Dr Tamsin O'Connell of the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge said, "The human remains from the excavations at Portus belong to a local population involved in heavy, manual labour, perhaps the saccarii (porters) who unloaded cargoes from incoming ships. When looking isotopically at the individuals dating to between the early second to mid fifth centuries AD, we see that they have a fairly similar diet to the rich and middle-class people buried at the Isola Sacra cemetery just down the road. It is interesting that although there are differences in social status between these burial populations, they both have access to similar food resources. This contradicts what we see elsewhere in the Roman world at this time. But, later on, something changes."
..."Towards the end of the mid fifth century we see a shift in the diet of the local populations away from one rich in animal protein and imported wheat, olive oil, fish sauce and wine from North Africa, to something more akin to a 'peasant diet', made up of mainly plant proteins in things like potages and stews. They're doing the same kind of manual labour and hard work, but were sustained by beans and lentils"
"This is the time period after the sack of the Vandals in AD 455..."
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
This is an aerial photo of the Portus Project excavations in 2009. Credit: Portus Project
here are the GGG topics introduced this week:
Also a good one for the weekly digest ping.
Eff beans and lentils, I want fish.
I think this is probably true, although I am not thoroughly educated on the subject and especially ignorant about the gap of at least 200 or 300 years between the fall of Rome and the conquests of the Mediterranean by Islam beginning no earlier than 620 A.D.
This was a comment I posted on your recent thread in which I cited the theory that the European dark ages were caused, or at least precipitated, by the advent of Islam and the shutting down of the Mediterranean Lake to Western commerce. So I read this article that you so timely posted today and it does appear that there is a gap between what must be described as the commencement of the dark age and the onslaught of Islam, that is, between 445 and 620 A.D.
Of course, we do not know if Western Europe would have recovered the splendor of the Western Roman Empire had it not been forced to contend with Islam.
Pasta Vandool?
Rome’s ultimate political form - empire - was corrupt, brutal, and stagnant. Its collapse was a necessay precondition for the development of the European nation state, a far more dynamic and potent political form that, in its greatest incarnation as the United States, looked to Rome’s republican ideals and the stock of experience generated by Europe’s nation states. Rome’s history thus proved to be far more useful than a continuation of the Roman empire could ever have been.
...”Towards the end of the mid fifth century we see a shift in the diet of the local populations away from one rich in animal protein and imported wheat, olive oil, fish sauce and wine from North Africa, to something more akin to a ‘peasant diet’, made up of mainly plant proteins in things like potages and stews. They’re doing the same kind of manual labour and hard work, but were sustained by beans and lentils”
...
They turned into soy boys.
Dr O’Connell concludes, “Are food resources and diets shaped by political ruptures? In the case of Portus, we see that when Rome was rich everybody, from the local elite to the dockworkers, was doing fine nutritionally. Then this big political rupture happens and wheat and other foodstuffs have to come from somewhere else. When Rome is on the decline, the manual labourers, at least, are not doing as well as previously.”
...
So “trickle down economics” is a good thing.
As Christians I think it might be satisfying to think it was Rome’s cruelty that brought them down but somehow I doubt it.
Maybe “absence” of trickle down is a really, really bad sign.
Bump for later.
Even a corrupt Roman Empire very likely would have proved a more stable bulwark against 1300 years or more of Islamic expansionism, it surely would have proved a more secure library of the wisdom and science of antiquity which, as you point out, our founders found instructive.
Even lower class Roman citizens living in Rome and its environs could enjoy what was considered luxury items thanks to the grain dole and like provided by the Roman state. Considering bread tended to represent a big proportion of income for most people the state subsiding that item freed up a lot of income for luxury items in this case meat. Most of these luxury food items would have been imported from throughout Rome’s Empire.
The Vandals conquered Rome's North Africa provinces cutting off Rome from those items. People had to go "local".
Rome seems to have been done in by about 150 years of severe cold weather due to a spasm of volcanic eruptions and the bubonic Plague of Justinian, which killed about half the population. I am not at all confident that we could withstand such a combination of calamaties along with Islam on the march.
Fish, olive oil, and wine. mmmm
That’s keto friendly too
In one episode of "Connections", James Burke holds up a large piece of black bread, and gave me another insight to earlier days. He said that bread REALLY was the Staff of Life - everything you ate with bread was a side dish. As things got better, appetites changed.
I think of that every time I see a vid of German soldiers in the East, wolfing down a huge slab of black bread.
In the case of areas still ruled by Islam, the Dark Ages haven't ended.
But the Dark Ages in Europe began earlier and ended more quickly, and consisted of a large number of population movements, some of which filled in areas heavily hit by the invasions themselves and/or outbreaks of some pandemic(s).
This probably reflects what was happening all over the Western Empire as cities and commerce collapsed and agriculture reverted to subsistence.
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