Cui Bono Est Patria Potestas? Sex, Death and Patriarchy on the Roman Danube

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ancient Rome is arguably the quintessential patriarchal society in the western historical tradition, in which the male head of household had the very power of life and death over his wife and children. Cross-culturally, anthropologists have found that those in a position of hierarchical authority generally manipulate socio-political systems to their own benefit. This has occasionally been phrased in terms of risk allocation, in which subject demographics are typically exposed to detrimental health situations and outcomes. The present study examines an osteological assemblage from a Late Roman city in eastern Europe for indicators of health risk by attributed sex–finding that males were subject to extreme levels of excess mortality and elevated prevalence of paleopathology. Roman patriarchy then, at least as practiced on the Danube frontier, appears to have generally buffered females from public health threats rather than males. While excess male mortality is considered the norm among modern post-Industrial societies, a wide range of historical variation raises questions about the deep history of this phenomenon, the extent to which it is culturally driven, and what is “normal” for our species. Moreover, what does it say about western patriarchal traditions if in practice they actually serve to focus risk upon men? ***This presentation will include images of human remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52556