Forensic Science Academy Club Meeting

 

The Forensic Science Academy Club held a meeting between 8:00AM-3:00PM on both Saturday and Sunday. During this weekend, we were given a brief look at some of the uses of lead  in the Roman world, including the hoary hypothesis that rampant lead poisoning led to the downfall of Rome.

The fact the Romans loved their lead isn't in question. There is plenty of textual and archaeological sources that inform us of the use of lead - as cosmetics, ballistics, sarcophagi, pipes, jewelry, curse tablets, utensils and cooking pots, and, of course sapa and defrutum(wine boiled down in lead pots) - but what almost all stories about the use of lead in ancient Rome miss is the osteological evidence. Metabolic disorders can be caused by a lack of nutrients - a lack of vitamin C gives you scurvy, and a lack of vitamin D gives you rickets - but they can also be caused by an abundance of  too much fluoride, mercury, arsenic,or lead.

Lead is found in the environment naturally, so we do expect to find some amount of lead in the skeleton of every person, ancient or modern. But, because of the physical properties of lead - it can be made into hard, sharp things - people have been using it for millennia and thus have been exposed to heavy metal toxicity for millennia as well. The dangers of lead actually weren't well known until the second half of the 20th century, which was when lead was taken out of things like paint and gasoline.

In modern society, lead poisoning is diagnosed through a blood test to determine the level of lead in the body. We don't have blood in ancient remains, so we have to investigate lead through the levels we can measure in bone and enamel. Humans should not have more than 1 mg/kg of lead in their bones (or 10 ug/dL measured in blood). What is clear, though, is that lead poisoning is not something you'd want to have. People with very severe lead poisoning tend to have major neurological changes - brain swelling leading to seizures and headaches, aggressive behavior, loss of short-term memory, and slurred speech - and a host of other problems, like anemia and constipation.

Now in order to answer the EQ for the week, we had to look at the evidence and conclude if lead poisoning caused the fall of the Roman Empire? Probably not. Yes, there was increased lead production in the Roman Empire, which we know from histories, ecological sources, artifacts, and now skeletons. But the data - few as they are - simply don't support a conclusion of high lead concentration in the entire population.

Dr. Aufderheide and FSAClub assistants did test 20 skeletons from Italy, including a few from the greater Rome area. However, this was not an in-depth study, in that the skeletons were from various places. They further note that they could not control for lead diagenesis, which may have thrown off their measurements and caused a large percentage of error. Twenty years later, the technology for identifying lead concentration in skeletons is greatly improved. Aufderheide and colleagues found that skeletons from the Roman period had much higher lead levels than in the previous centuries, which is consistent with our study and the understanding that lead working increased in this time period.