Jongman Willem M, Jacobs Jan P A M, Klein Goldewijk Geertje M
University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
Econ Hum Biol. 2019 Aug;34:138-150. doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2019.01.005. Epub 2019 Jan 16.
Ancient Rome was the largest and most populous empire of its time, and the largest pre-industrial state in European history. Recent though not universally accepted research suggests that at least for the most populous central periods of its history standard of living was also rather higher than before or after. To trace whether this is also reflected in Roman biological standard of living, we present the first large and more or less comprehensive dataset, based on skeletal data for some 10,000 individuals, covering all periods of Roman history, and all regions (even if inevitably unequally). We discuss both the methodologies that we developed and the historical results. Instead of reconstructing heights from the long bones assuming fixed body proportions or from one individual long bone, we apply exploratory factor analysis and calculate factor scores for 50-year periods. Our measure of the biological standard of living declined during the last two centuries B.C. and started to improve again, slowly at first, from the second century A.D. It correlated negatively with population, but also with other aspects of standard of living such as wages or diets.
古罗马是当时最大且人口最多的帝国，也是欧洲历史上最大的前工业化国家。近期研究虽未获普遍认可，但表明至少在其历史上人口最多的核心时期，生活水平也比之前或之后要高得多。为探究这一点在罗马人的生物生活水平上是否也有体现，我们基于约10000人的骨骼数据，呈现了首个规模较大且较为全面的数据集，涵盖罗马历史的各个时期以及所有地区（即便不可避免地存在不均衡）。我们既讨论了所开发的方法，也探讨了历史研究结果。我们并非通过假设固定身体比例从长骨重建身高，也不是从单一长骨来重建身高，而是运用探索性因素分析，并计算每50年时间段的因素得分。我们衡量的生物生活水平在公元前最后两个世纪有所下降，从公元2世纪开始又再次改善，起初较为缓慢。它与人口呈负相关，也与生活水平的其他方面如工资或饮食呈负相关。
