13th October 2011, 06:54 PM
killgrove Wrote:It's not that foreigners in England or in Rome (or anywhere else in the Empire) are a surprise, it's that most people in the Empire acculturated and we have little archaeological evidence of people buried with the trappings of another culture. So isotope analysis is (at least for my work in Rome) the only way to find immigrants who weren't commemorated as such on tombstones. Once we find the bodies of immigrants, we can ask questions like: Were their lives worse than those of the locals? You'd think that they were, since the immigrants were more likely to be slaves, but the data on disease don't support a difference in health or lifestyle at this point. That's why I and others are looking for/at immigrants in the Empire - histories tell us they existed, but we know precious little about their lives.
Hence the interest with my little group (sadly it is quite little, poor bone survival, but there are probably 9 or so with ok teeth), the guys are the crossbow brooch and belt-set crew, who from the Lankhills results have 'foreign' written all over them, but if they are 'foreign' who are the women buried with them, did they bring wives/mothers/daughters with them or did they marry into the 'local' population (for which there's now lots of baseline data for Catterick/Bainesse. There's no confusion here, they collectively form a distinct spatial group (nearest other RB burials are 250m+ away in a seperate 'cemetery') rather than being physically/spatially mixed-in with the 'general' poulation as at Lankhills. Better than average dating too - the 2 purse-hoards and all the pots and stuff help! Sadly there doesn't seem to be any publication of the Norton group that I've been able to find, so uncertain as to their relationship with other burials - apparently the Norton teeth are ok though