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25 August 2021Ercolano gives us other news and curiosities about the ancient Romans.

This time we talk about diet, which was different for men and women, and which has been reconstructed in detail: men ate more fish and cereals, while women ate more animal products and fruit and vegetables.

This discovery was made thanks to the amino acids preserved in the bones of 17 adult individuals, analyzed by researchers from the University of York as part of a study conducted in collaboration with the Archaeological Park of Herculaneum, that of Pompeii and the Museum of Civilizations of Rome.



The results


The discovery was published in the journal Science Advances. "The remains of those who died in Herculaneum in AD 79 offer a unique opportunity to examine the lifestyles of individuals from an ancient community who lived and died together," explains the 'biomolecular archaeologist Oliver Craig, head of the BioArCH team at the University of York. "Historical sources often allude to differential access to food resources in Roman society, but they rarely provide direct or quantitative information."


Thanks to a new approach for analyzing bone amino acids, and their carbon and nitrogen isotopes, the researchers were able to find "significant differences in the proportions of marine and terrestrial foods consumed by males and females, which means that access to food was differentiated by gender, "adds Craig.



The food difference


This custom is also found in other places in Italy during the Roman era. "Men were more directly involved in fishing and maritime activities, generally occupied more privileged positions in society and were freed from slavery at an earlier age, which allowed them to have greater access to expensive goods such as fresh fish," explains the first author of the study, Silvia Soncin. The analysis of the isotopes also made it possible to quantify the foods included in the diet of the ancient inhabitants of Herculaneum: the results show that fish and seafood were more abundant than in today's Mediterranean diet, while the proportion of cereals remained more or less similar.