A bio-archaeological study of 1,800 years of resilience and adaptation to urbanity

Introduction

CityLife explores, from a bioarchaeological perspective, how historical populations adapted to an urban environment and developed resilience to the disadvantages of urban life. By exploiting the vast amount of information contained in human skeletal remains, the project will clarify the roles of biological factors in the durability and sustainability of pre-industrial urban societies.

Methodology

Newly developed osteological, chemical isotope, and genomic methods will be used in this project, together with cutting-edge tools for statistical evaluation. CityLife will evaluate the living conditions, economy, population structure, pathogen load, and immune defenses in a sample of more than 4,500 skeletons from a hotspot of European urban culture: Thessaloniki.

Historical Context

This city in northern Greece still exists today, and in historic times it formed a bridge between the Roman West and the Byzantine East. Thessaloniki offers the unique constellation to study urban life from 300 BC to AD 1,500 and thus to draw inference about an urban population in a single place continuously over 1,800 years.

Objectives

The main objectives of the project are to:

1. Infer urban living standards by studying secular changes in anthropometric indexes, infant diet, childhood stress, and trauma in a combined manner.
2. Investigate the resilience and sustainability of urban food systems by reconstructing individual diets and local supply networks.
3. Investigate social structures, religious cohabitation, and migration by genetically reconstructing the degree of kin and non-kin relationships.
4. Explore the effects of pathogen exposure on human evolution and health by studying genes associated with increased immunological response and the oral microbiome.

Conclusion

CityLife will examine empirically tangible aspects of biocultural development to answer the simple question of how humans became urban species.