BIOSOCIOPOLIS · The BIOarchaeology of SOCIO-POLitical changes in AmphipolIS: Exploring the impact of broad historical trends and status quo transitions on human lifeways and deathways, through a multi-proxy approach

The BIOarchaeology of SOCIO-POLitical changes in AmphipolIS: Exploring the impact of broad historical trends and status quo transitions on human lifeways and deathways, through a multi-proxy approach

This project will develop a new understanding of how multiple socio-political transitions, representing different forms of urbanism, may impact on lifeways (way of life or manner of living) and deathways (practices of a society surrounding death) on a diachronic scale. This will be accomplished by combining theoretical, macroscopic and geo-chemical approaches. The diachronic case of ancient Amphipolis in Northern Greece, experiencing many different political models, was chosen as an ideal case study. Living under different social and political regimes shapes the human body, both biologically and culturally. Having knowledge on the types of political systems and aspects of their social hierarchy provides in theory the capacity to actually measure how different regimes may impact on lifeways and deathways, from the rich to the poor in a society. Amphipolis, which is located at the modern regional unit of Serres, in Macedonia, north of Greece, experienced different forms and ideologies of urbanism, such as colonization, political autonomy, consolidation and imperialization, between the Late Archaic/Classical and Roman periods. The core aim of the proposed project is to develop a new model to reveal the extent to which multiple and consecutive socio-political transitions on a population in a diachronic perspective affect human lifeways and deathways. Three research objectives are formed: 1) To better understand the relation between cultural identities in death and lifeways under the prism of diachronic socio-political processes, through a combined analysis of funerary practices with health, lifestyle and mobility. 2) To reveal the degree and ways in which health and lifestyle are affected by multiple political systems, by integrating stress and pathology indicators into lifestyle markers. 3) To provide a high-resolution on how cultural and biological factors may lead to stress and disease, through investigating mobility/biodistance (the latter is defined as a measure of relatedness/divergence between groups of people) combined with health/lifestyle. This approach will also offer a contextualized framework for the holistic study of human mobility. Investigating the effects of multiple and consecutive socio-political transitions diachronically in the same context, under the lens of bioarchaeology, offers the unique opportunity for critical new knowledge relative to defining the balance between continuity and transformation on a large temporal scale. It also reveals how differential resource management associated with multiple political systems impacts on human lifeways and deathways. Such an approach remains rather unexplored and can bring longer term scientific impacts beyond the framework of this specific context. Moreover, as reconstructing the health profile of an ancient society is most informative about the way of living in the past, neglecting to properly explore predisposing factors for stress and disease can create serious biases and misinterpretations. This is because every individual alive at a particular age is not at the same risk of dying at that age, due to biological (e.g. genetic predisposition) and cultural (e.g. differential access to food due to socio-economic status) reasons. This concept is described by the term "heterogeneous frailty". Nonetheless, the concept of frailty has been widely overlooked, as very few studies have directly investigated it as a subject worthy of inquiry in and of itself. Mortuary evidence linked to ‘‘elaborate” and “modest” burial features in Amphipolis’ cemeteries, as well as the presence of multiple inhumation burials which possibly suggests likely familial use, offers the opportunity to investigate the sources of frailty both culturally and biologically, thus making a true methodological advancement for the field of bioarchaeology. We are living in ‘an age of migration’ and scholars from multiple disciplines, including archaeology, have become intrigued with this very complex phenomenon. The proposed project integrates funerary evidence and historical theory into macroscopic bioarchaeological analyses and stable isotopes to reveal the lived experience of human mobility. Finally, studying the history of Amphipolis, which formed intense inter-state relations with all the big forces of the classical Greek world, can bring important progress for humanities. The current bioarchaeological state of the art for historical period Greece has mainly focused on exploring general health during the Roman era and to a lesser degree on the Hellenistic and Classical periods, while diet and migration have been less addressed during the entire stated timeframe. Historical sources on Amphipolis’ dynamic history, offer information on administrative, constitutional and cultural changes. Nonetheless a key thing to consider is that many or most of these sources were politically motivated and so only reflect aspects of interest to the writer and their agenda, not neutral testimonies in most cases. Bioarchaeology has the capacity to illuminate lived human experiences which remain invisible or altered in historical or archaeological information. Therefore, through the paradigm of Amphipolis, this approach can also induce a better understanding of lived experience in the ancient Greek world and by extension in the Classical world. The BIOSOCIOPOLIS project is hosted at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) in Greece, School of History and Archaeology. The BIOSOCIOPOLIS team consists of a) the fellow, Dr. Dimitra Ermioni Michael; b) the PI, Associate Professor Sevi Triantaphyllou ; c) Assistant Professor Panagiotis Tselekas (AUTh), d) Associate Professor Ilias Sverkos (AUTh), e) Dr. Dimitra Malamidou, the Director of the Ephorate of Antiquities in Serres and of the Amphipolis Museum and f) Assistant Professor Christophe Snoeck, BB-LAB, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).

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