Speaker: Rebecca Gilmour
Skeletons preserve unique records of our health, activity, injuries and experiences over time.
Bioarchaeologists and palaeopathologists use these traces, together with archaeological evidence,
to reconstruct the lives of people from the past. This talk examines an unusual Roman-period
burial from Carnuntum, Austria: a man buried outside the city’s main cemetery who appears to
have experienced significant violence. Was he a gladiator? An execution or murder victim? Or
can his skeleton tell us something more complicated about how he lived and died? By bringing
together biological, archaeological, and historical lines of evidence, we explore what might have
happened to this person, and what his story can reveal about violence, marginality, and life on the
Roman frontier.