That’s the question raised by a BBC story about analyses of materials from an almost century-old excavation at a Roman villa in the Thames Valley.
The data: remains of 97 infants, all of whom died close to birth. The coincidence suggests deliberate killing of newborn babies.
Archaeologist Dr Jill Eyers said: “The only explanation you keep coming back to is that it’s got to be a brothel”.
And maybe it was (although see below for more on that question).
But my attention was initially caught by this link in the chain of interpretation:
With little or no effective contraception, unwanted pregnancies could have been common at Roman brothels.
So: is it the case that Roman period Britons– or Romans, for that matter– had “litle or no effective contraception”?
Certainly, that assertion fits a pair of common assumptions about the present and the past: the first, that medicine has seen a constant progress over time; the second, that people in pre-modern societies experienced sex as a less mediated, more natural part of life. Putting these two together, Roman society should have had less medical knowledge, and fewer efforts (or less effective efforts) to control sexuality and fertility.
But there is actually quite a lot of evidence to argue that the recent past has been a period when medical practices concerned with women’s reproductive health narrowed and were controlled more tightly than before. For example, in her book An Archaeology of Mothering, Laurie Wilkie discusses how the move away from midwives toward medical doctors led to changes in contraceptive practices within just the last 150 years in the United States.
So, what do we actually know about Roman contraception? The Ancient History Guide at About.com, N.S. Gill, posted in August 2003 about silphium, an herbal contraceptive and abortifacient so popular that it was wiped out in its native range by the second century AD. In the long article that was Gill’s source, David Tschanz writes:
While silphium was considered to be the most effective herbal contraceptive of the classical world, not everyone could afford it and there were always other substitutes. Another member of the Ferula species, asafoetida, which gives Worcestershire sauce its distinctive aroma, was also widely used (though considered less effective) since it was cheaper and more abundant.
Nor were these the only herbals used; Tschanz discusses a number of other plants employed to control fertility. And that doesn’t even begin to consider mechanical, barrier methods known and used in the ancient world.
Doesn’t sound much like a society with little contraception, does it?
Were the herbal contraceptives effective? Demographic evidence suggests that couples were successfully controlling family size in the first five centuries of the Christian Era, when the population of the Roman Empire declined as life expectancy increased. As Tschanz says,
For centuries historians paid little attention to ancient accounts of plants possessing birth control properties, referring them as “ineffectual potions.” Modern laboratory analyses however suggest that the plants used in these potions were effective and ancient women probably had more control over their reproductive lives than previously thought.
For more, I refer you to the book that opened my eyes on this topic: historian John Riddle’s 1997 Eve’s Herbs.
Maybe this information about the Roman empire isn’t applicable to Roman Britain?
Well, historian Malcolm Todd says in his 2004 Companion to Roman Britain that “family planning was widely practiced in Roman Britain”.
Does that mean the archaeologists are wrong in their interpretation of the infant burials at Hambleden? not necessarily– but the interpretation is not strengthened by presuming that birth control would have been unavailable, or that knowledge of contraception was limited, in the face of evidence to the contrary.
Let’s accept the argument that the death of 97 infants at the same age is unlikely to be due to natural causes. That means we are dealing with a cultural practice of infanticide of newborns.
These would presumably have been unwanted children, born to individuals who did not have access to contraception due to their individual rank, wealth, or social status.
But there is more than one way to imagine this villa populated with women who, although living in a house of some presumed luxury, did not themselves have the means to use contraception known to and employed by others in Roman Britain.
While sex workers in a brothel would be one population that might meet this description, another would be servants or slaves, or just common laborers without sufficient economic means to pay for contraceptives.
So is there anything that makes this more obviously a brothel site?
Well, actually, no. The record for the site at English Heritage describes it as
A Romano-British homestead built before the mid-1st century and occupied until the end of the 4th, comprising four buildings with an enclosure wall. The principal dwelling house, 92 x 82 ft, was of the double corridor type; the large number of furnaces found suggest that the establishment was engaged in corn production on a large scale.
“Corn production on a large scale”. More than a dozen corn ovens were part of the complex.
Not a brothel: a commercial farm. And, presumably, one that drew on a lot of labor, including a lot of women’s labor.
And Hambledon apparently is not (just) a villa, but more of a village; the buildings that yielded the data being interpreted as a brothel
are part of an extensive complex of buildings and fields arranged alongside a paved road. It seems likely that this was more than a villa complex: traces of at least 21 buildings have been recorded, all with stone foundations.
Malcolm Todd, in his Companion, actually comments on the Hambledon villa site itself, writing that it is “now interpreted as the discovery of an official infant cemetery in a rural community, where burial in family groups was not the tradition”.
There are ways that an interpretation as a brothel might be supported. But the fact that there were a large number of newborns who were apparently deliberately killed would only be support for this interpretation if we knew, or thought we knew, that sex workers in Roman Britain were especially apt to experience unwanted pregnancy, and to have no option but infanticide.
These are the final lurking assumptions here, and they tell us more about contemporary stereotypes than about the reality of sex work in Rome or in Roman Britain.
Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives 
Ade
June 25, 2010
Is there any historical parallel, of any kind, for a brothel where they preferred to wait for a child to be born rather than abort it, and then performed burial instead of exposure? Where they believed abortion more hazardous than childbirth? Where they were happy to feed and support pregnant women, but not infants? I can’t believe anyone has taken this seriously.
Laura Agustín
June 25, 2010
I thought from the outset what a prejudiced, flimsy, hate-mongering sort of conclusion these researchers jumped to. Really, as though one could not speculate about all sorts of reasons why dead babies could be in one place. The contraception issue is separate and the potential connexion with the babies is also unsound. Bah!
Rosemary Joyce
June 25, 2010
@Ade: there have been discoveries of newborns informally disposed of near historically known brothels from the nineteenth century in the US. The 2005 article “Babies in the Privy: Prostitution, Infanticide, and Abortion in New York City’s Five Points District” by Thomas A. Crist, in the special issue of Historical Archaeology “Sin City” (vol. 39, no. 1) is the classic instance.
But here’s the difference– and it speaks to Laura’s, Ade’s, and my immediate negative reaction to this report: Crist is exceptionally careful to think about the circumstances that would have made this happen. (And the number of cases is quite small, by the way– probably two events, one a miscarriage).
Crist writes, “the discovery of the skeletal remains provides an opportunity to trace changes in American social and legal attitudes regarding infanticide, abortion, and prostitution and explore the difficult choices faced by workingwomen in New York City from the colonial period to the middle of the 19th century.”
Difficult choices. And choices, specifically, taking place during a period when contraceptive choices were being redefined and limited.
As I said in the original post: we know how to identify brothels, including Roman brothels. The archaeological evidence here does not support that. While it is pretty clear from historical texts that early infanticide was not condemned in Roman society, to connect this practice to prostitution without considering the wider context is surprising.
Laura Agustín
June 25, 2010
here’s the thing: if we started with prejudices or presuppositions about any group – christians, jews, peasants, you name it – we could just as easily say look here are 97 infanticides we simply cannot think of any explanation for but that *they* did it. it’s so utterly irresponsible, i can’t believe these are ‘archaeologists’, ie people with academic training in methodology and interpretation of data. what are the bbc doing picking it up so uncritically?
Rosemary Joyce
June 25, 2010
@Laura: two different reactions
(1) The BBC is promoting a television program. The sensationalization of archaeology is a legacy of the belief– erroneous, I think– on the part of TV and even print that archaeology reported straight will be uninteresting to people. This has never been my experience in talking to groups, and I talk to a lot of non-archaeologists. So, instead of telling us a compelling story about how curated remains from the early 20th century can be studied anew and yield new information, we get, as it has been being tweeted, “Roman orgies and dead babies”.
(2) But we also have to be careful to be responsible to people in the past, and not refuse them their own ethics. There is abundant literary evidence for Roman attitudes about the death of very young infants, that tells us very clearly that infanticide was practiced.
That said, to understand how another group of people view differences in life and death is hard. It requires first of all a commitment not to go for the merely exotic, or to reinforce a modernist view of the past as less ethical, more primitive/savage/barbarian, less progressive… the list goes on.
So the serious question to be asked is, how did Roman women– and men– understand personhood, and where did very young infants fit in to that understanding? There is evidence that Roman understandings of human being held that very young children were not yet fully formed persons. (This is badly warped in the original reporting of this story.) And it is also the case that Roman society understood every person– even fully grown adults– as a part of a larger, enduring collectivity (the family). With an ideology that the collective good of that enduring whole was more important than the lives of the people who temporarily carried it forward, the choice not to foster a child becomes easier to understand.
In my own writing about the deliberate deaths of very young children in prehispanic Central America, I have faced a similar challenge. I hope I did justice to these lives. Where it brought me in the end is to a third factor that is required in seriously engaging with a very different past society: and that is concepts of spiritual afterlife. Regardless of arguments to the contrary based on claims that Christian values cause modern Euro-Americans to view life after death as ideal, it is clear that we live in a culture that sees death as the end of real life. But for the ancient Romans, that way of looking at life and death does not work.
Finally, my reference to the possibility– indeed, probability, given the normalcy of family planning and contraception in Roman society– that the individuals involved, if indeed we are dealing with infanticide, would have been people whose economic means did not allow them to practice contraception: Here, my point of reference– as it should be for anyone thinking about these things– is Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ important book Death Without Weeping, which presents the tearing realities of women in the contemporary world who have to accept the deaths of the very young as normal and expected. What this ethnography reminds us of is that this does not imply that mothers were cold about these deaths. Nor should we assume that Roman mothers were about the deaths of children when they did consent to infanticide.
And finally: yes, there may be other ways to explain this group of newborns dying within a few weeks of birth. The reference in the Blackwell Companion to Roman Britain to this being a community cemetery takes away one reason to claim this could not be the accumulated bodies of children who died early from natural causes that systematically affected newborns.
Laura Agustín
June 26, 2010
I just looked you up to see whether I could invite you for a coffee but alas no, we are not in the same place. I completely get everything you caution about as I do the same about different notions about sex, family, money and such in the present day. I remember the first time ‘cultural relativism’ was hurled at me as an accusation. Looking at the past and looking at the present are not so different from an anthropological point of view.
It was also irresponsible of the original reporter or programme blurber to slip as though naturally from dead babies to absence of contraception. Sigh.