Association between biological kinship and lifestyle in the Hellenistic-early Roman community of Menainon, Sicily

Abstract

In the Greco-Roman society, the household (oikos or domus) was the central socio-economic unit, and its members were likely to have shared the same space, similar food and economic activities. Given the importance of biological kinship as a factor determining household membership, this paper explores the extent to which individuals from Hellenistic-early Roman Menainon (Sicily) who were likely biological relatives also shared a similar lifestyle (e.g., diet, mechanical and physiological stress). Biodistances (pairwise Gower coefficients) were used as a proxy for biological kinship and were estimated using dental metric and nonmetric traits on a sample of 98 individuals. The results did not support our initial hypothesis that individuals biologically related shared a similar lifestyle. Instead, a very limited association was found between biodistances and other skeletal markers, but also between biodistances and the spatial arrangement of the cemetery. This is not an unexpected finding since biological kinship was only one of the many factors determining household membership in the Greco-Roman world. Moreover, it is clear from historical sources that household members may have shared several daily experiences but they also held distinct roles, which would affect their dietary patterns, physiological and mechanical stress levels. Finally, Menainon was a rural settlement, where community members likely shared comparable burdens on an everyday basis, as also attested by previous bioarchaeological studies. Future analyses need to incorporate currently unavailable aspects of the material culture from the cemetery in conjunction with the skeletal evidence in order to explore kinship from a biosocial perspective.