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How can we use material traces of past lives to understand sex and gender in the past?
Browsing All posts tagged under »Roman Britain«
Dead babies still are bad evidence for a Roman brothel
Last year I asked the rhetorical question “Are dead babies good evidence for a Roman brothel?” My post rehearsed a number of reasons to be skeptical of the widely reported story about a Roman British site being described as a brothel. Centrally, I objected to the claim that Roman women had “little or no access […]
British, Roman, or African? On race, ethnicity, and nationality
January 26, 2011
The past was not full of homogeneous towns. People in the past were not uniform in their cultures, their sexualities, or their subjective experiences. If I have one goal in my teaching– one goal in my writing– it would be to get that point across, so that finding difference in past populations would be expected, […]
Written in the bones: woman gladiator or upwardly mobile peasant?
July 4, 2010
Or maybe not. The BBC headline blares Female ‘gladiator’ remains found in Herefordshire and the alarm in my head goes off. Are there weapons, are there any of the things specific to gladiators? well, no. So what’s the real story here? The lead: the archaeologists “have found the grave of a massive, muscular woman”. And […]
Are dead babies good evidence for a Roman brothel?
June 25, 2010
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 […]
Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives 
August 9, 2011
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