This isn’t the Summer of Love; it may be the Summer of Bad-Tempered Arguments About Classics and Racism. Over in the US, Sarah Bond‘s articles on the ‘white-washing’ of classical statues – that is, why do we think of them in terms of gleaming white marble when they were actually painted? – have provoked a furious backlash from the far right, including death threats.* In the UK, an alt-right blogger objected to the fact that a BBC educational cartoon on life in Roman Britain included black people – “I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?” – and was carefully schooled by @MikeStuchbery_, Matthew Nicholls from Reading, Mary Beard and others – with the result that Mary, at least, now seems to be spending six hours a day responding to people on Twitter about this.
What is surprising about these two arguments is that the substantive issues – ancient statues were painted, the Roman Empire (including Britain) was ethnically diverse – are such old hat. This is stuff that today’s professional classicists and ancient historians take pretty well for granted, as a starting point for more detailed and interesting investigation – and yet the statement of such facts appears as an extreme provocation to certain people. The instinctive response is “That cannot possibly be right!”, followed by speculation about why someone would nevertheless promote an idea that cannot possibly be right (tl;dr: it’s all about the Political Correctness).
I’m not proposing to discuss these issues – because they’re banal, and because other colleagues are much better qualified to do so. What interests me is the framing of such historical arguments, and the dynamics of the encounter between academic studies of the ancient world and (certain sections of) the wider public. In brief, why do some people start from the position that painted statues and multi-coloured Romans cannot be right?
Because ideology. Because the Greeks and Romans were like us (sc. white Europeans and/or Noble Britons), and their culture is the basis of our ethnically pure civilisation and must be preserved from left-wing assault, and all attempts at mixing races are doomed to end in bloody failure because innate human nature and just look at Birmingham. Etc. Not a lot to be said here.
Because education. This is more interesting; the statements of academics seem wrong to people because they flatly contradict what someone has been taught. It’s a crucial part of Sarah’s argument that we tend to assume classical statues were white because that’s how they’ve been presented for centuries (and I would readily admit that’s how I instinctively think of them), and likewise Romans have been depicted for generations as just like us (if anything, more like us than the hairy Britons; civilisation, neat haircuts). The academic approach here is to say, yes, but we now know better, as a result of further research (e.g. evidence for wide range of different ethnic groups revealed by Romano-British epigraphy) and because we can now see how past historical interpretations were distorted by contemporary ideologies. For us, contemporary ideas – certainly if they’ve become widely accepted, rather than just being the brainwave of a single individual – are more likely to be more correct than those of a century ago. But is this view necessarily true of non-academics? The past doesn’t change, one might assume, so how does one explain interpretations of the past changing except by reference to external factors, like intrusive PC-ness?
Because equivocation. Our knowledge of the past, especially the more distant past, is patchy to say the least; further, academics are trained to consider the whole range of possibilities, to be honest about the limits of knowledge and the uncertainties of interpretation, and generally to insist on qualifying even simple answers. All of which invites the response “You mean you don’t know? Why should I take any notice of anything you say, then?” This then justifies a return to the (apparent) certainties of one’s existing ideas about the past, which were probably taught as straightforward fact without any of this shiftiness about probability and likelihood.
Because science. The latest twist in the debate on Roman Britain has been the arrival of the ‘genetics trumps humanistic waffle’** argument, some of them genuinely convinced that science offers a solid foundation of Objective Truth that renders everything else irrelevant, and others just seizing on it as a convenient prop for their existing views. I’m vaguely hoping that a specialist in this field is going to write a detailed piece of what we really learn from studies like the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics project on the genetic structure of the British population (see e.g. this New Scientist summary; full publication here for those with access to scientific journals). In the meantime, very briefly: (1) scientific results are also a matter of interpreting data sets, albeit better data sets than historians and archaeologists get to play with; we need to ask questions about sample size (2039 individuals in this study, carefully selected to try to ensure geographical coverage), confidence intervals and the like – note that the scientists themselves use words like “estimate” and “suggest” as soon as they move from describing the data to interpreting them; (2) the data tell us what they tell us, not more; in this case, that a particular analysis of the DNA of this sample shows little (not no) trace of African heritage, and also little trace of Mediterranean or Viking (except in Orkney) or Norman heritage – which clearly doesn’t show that all those people were myths or never invaded, but simply that they did not have much impact on the genetic makeup of the modern British population. We then, as the scientists did, can speculate on why this might be: how far is it a matter of numbers (how many Romans in proportion to total population?), or of behaviour (how far did Romans interbreed with existing population?) or of other events (how many people, precisely those with Roman heritage, may have evacuated to continental Europe when the legions were withdrawn?). Jumping up and down yelling that “DNA shows there wasn’t any ethnic diversity in Roman Britain!” is completely wrong on multiple counts, even if you take the scientific results entirely at face value.
So, at least four reasons why these sorts of debates blow up. What do we academics do about this? In many cases – I’m going to be optimistic and say ‘most’ – it calls for explanation, helping people move beyond the myths and half-truths they may have acquired at school or from the media, to understand how historians (and scientists) actually go about investigating and reconstructing the past. This may not be easy, as I suspect many people want more certainty than we’re ever happy to give them, whereas we feel quite comfortable with debates and competing interpretations – and part of the task of taking our research to a wider public is to recognise this gap in expectations, and think of ways of bridging it.
This applies to those arguing or asking questions in good faith, which unfortunately doesn’t include everyone. Bluntly, those arguing on the basis of ideology are unlikely to be persuaded by evidence or logic; they already know why academics are saying these things, as part of our cultural Marxist campaign against civilisation and traditional values, and are simply trying to elicit some sort of admission to this effect. Which is why we have ‘mute’ and ‘block’.
*Yes, I know the original article was published in April, so not exactly summer, but the worst of the online fury seems to have extended well into June…
**Or ‘history is written by the winners, genetics is the history of the masses’, as Peter Donnelly, the lead scientist on the Wellcome project, suggested.
Update: with many thanks to @LapisAlienus for passing on the link, the full version of the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics paper is free to all at https://zeze.sci-hub.ac/c84bf21250bddcf1040021e61ca869fe/leslie2015.pdf. By all accounts Nassim Nicholas Taleb has now weighed into the debate on the side of Science and Statistics, denouncing the entire discipline of history as purely anecdotal because it never occurred to anyone to criticise sources or think about things other than battles and elite politics. I’ve been blocked by him on Twitter for years, despite to my knowledge never having actually engaged with him in any way, so I may be missing some subtlety in that argument.
Update: definitely worth looking at this post from the excellent Caitlin Green on oxygen isotope analysis as a basis for identifying African immigrants into Britain – suggesting that 45% of British cemeteries studied contained at least one such person.
Update: really good piece in The Atlantic about the genetic side of the debate, drawing on the vital work of Patrick Geary; thanks to James Harland for the link.
Update 4/8: for the sake of completeness, I feel I should provide a link to what may or may not be N.N. Taleb’s final word on the subject: https://medium.com/incerto/something-is-broken-in-the-uk-intellectual-sphere-7efc9a1f154a. Also because it’s hilariously funny.
Update 6/8: While I’m enormously grateful that commentators on this blog, even when disagreeing with what I’m saying, have been reasonable and courteous (I was fully prepared for the likelihood of not approving some comments – my blog, my rules – but haven’t had to), and even on Twitter I have encountered very few trolls, I am distressed to see that Mary Beard is still enduring volumes of vile abuse. Why could this possibly be? Vastly higher profile than me, of course, but might the fact she’s a woman have something to do with it? In this day and age…
Update: meant to post this yesterday but forgot; really interesting blog post from Howard Williams on the challenges of archaeological illustration and the issue of representing ethnicity via skin colour: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/04/ethnic-diversity-in-roman-britain-it-all-kicks-off-with-images/amp/.
Update 7/8: I’m not proposing to link to every discussion on this case, but a new post from a philosopher and population geneticist, Massimo Pigliucci, is really excellent on the dangers of ‘scientism’: https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/beard-nassem-taleb-twitter-feud-and-dangers-of-scientism-auid-868?access=ALL
Sphinx 
Very very well said. I hope some of the more doltish commenters on/assailants of Mary B et al end up here and don’t find it “tl”.
It would be useful to quantify statements like “Roman Britain was ethnically diverse”. What does that mean in numbers? Let’s say, generously, that Roman Britain was 0.1% African in terms of ancestry. But is that really “diverse”? If some place in the UK today is .1% non-European, wouldn’t you call it extremely, shockingly NON-diverse? If you make an educational cartoon of a .1% non-European society where non-Europeans are prominently featured, is that about being historically accurate or is it about pandering to current ideological and political sensibilities?
The simple answer: wouldn’t it be wonderful, if only we could! Well, I imagine one could develop some very rough orders of magnitude on the basis of known numbers of Roman soldiers and officials, guesstimates about total population of Britain etc., or analysis of trace minerals in bones that can show where an individual grew up, if we can gather a big enough sample. I lack confidence that we’ll ever be able to get beyond orders of magnitude to the more precise figures you seem to be hoping for, but I don’t work directly on this topic; maybe there is someone out there doing the research who’ll come up with much more detailed information.
I would want to open up the question of defining ‘diversity’; as you suggest, if gets used in different ways, sometimes very loosely. I’m not sure that fixing on a specific figure necessarily gets us very far; it’s relative, surely? 0.1% would indeed be very non-diverse in modern Britain, but was that necessarily the case in a premodern society where long-distance migration was generally rare? Would the figure tell us anything about how Romans or Britons perceived their society – given that they weren’t using our categories or concepts anyway? There are contexts where “more than none” is still significant, at least in terms of how *we* think about the Romans in Britain.
I wouldn’t charactise the BBC video as “pandering” to current sensibilities – but that’s not to claim that it’s not influenced by contemporary concerns; of course it is, all history is. The point is that there is not a choice between a neutral, objective depiction of the Romans in Britain and a distorted, politicised depiction; either is political. Show the Roman family as ‘white’, as happens most of the time (not even brown or olive!), and you are reinforcing the traditional image, with its various unsavoury associations, whether you intend to or not.
The Roman family shown in the video is perfectly credible. If it were claimed that all such families included someone of African origin, that would be absurd, but I don’t see that it is – especially as such images are not decontextualised, but received within a wider tradition that presents the Romans as basically white. It’s clear from the evidence that Roman society was ethnically diverse – obviously, in some places more than others; cities more than the countryside, capital cities and ports more than small towns, the Mediterranean more than Britain etc. What’s the problem with depicting this?
It would be disingenuous of me to claim that I don’t know why some people get worked up about this: it undermines their ideological claim that ethnic diversity is a recent and unnatural thing, while reinforcing their belief in a liberal conspiracy of academics, media etc, subjecting everything to the iron rule of political correctness. Possibly everyone objecting to the video is a committed racist, but the point of this post was to explore the idea that there are other possible reasons.
“I’m not sure that fixing on a specific figure necessarily gets us very far; it’s relative, surely? 0.1% would indeed be very non-diverse in modern Britain, but was that necessarily the case in a premodern society where long-distance migration was generally rare? ”
Seems a bit like you’re avoiding the question. Are you suggesting that any ancient society with more than one single foreigner would be ‘diverse’? If yes, isn’t this just a reflection of the racist “one drop rule”? If they were not diverse, then why specifically decide to portray sub-Saharan Africans as Romans occupying prominent positions in Roman Britain?
Considering that Classical and Hellenistic Greek cities had a large number of foreigners – metics, slaves etc. – would it be accurate or proper for the BBC to portray random Greek characters in educational videos as ‘black’?
What with the argument of Septimius Severus being thrown around, I have to ask -are all Africans “black” or “colored” in the eyes of white Britons, regardless of their origin (Kabyles, Copts, Igbo)? How long has a white Mediterranean have to sit in the sun to be considered “not white”?
Reversing the argument: considering that imperial Rome was indeed multiethnic, are Ray Laurence’s videos about teenagers in Rome racist because they only feature Caucasians (albeit with varied skin tones)?
An additional point, and a clarification. Firstly, obviously, ethnic diversity in Roman Britain was more than just those with African origins. Secondly, I’d want to query your suggestion that it’s a binary choice, *either* historical accuracy *or* making a political point. Why not both at once?
In response to Mr Papadopoulos: yes, I’m aware that it may seem evasive, and/or typical academic pedantry, to decline to name a threshold figure for ‘diversity’. But 1. I do think it’s context-dependent, including change over time (so, yes, in some situations “more than none” *is* significant; in others clearly not); 2. I don’t actually research in this area, but comment on forms of historical argument; 3. It’s actually off the point, since the initial issue was not “how diverse was the population of Roman Britain?” but “is it historically inaccurate to show a black Roman officer?” Answer: no.
I don’t think Ray Laurence’s videos are racist; historically, the majority of Romans *weren’t* African. As for Greece, showing “random” Ancient Greek characters as black would indeed be potentially problematic, as citizenship in most cities was exclusive and heavily focused on ancestry; showing metics, slaves, ex-slaves, visiting merchants etc as black, no problem.
Is there a possibility that historians are biased towards the more interesting interpretations? If Roman Britain was a stolid lump of pasty Britons, with a small overlay of soldiers and officials, largely from European provinces, it’s not that interesting. Much more fun if it was a bit more exotic. So it’s tempting to make too much of a few finds.
(The genetic arguments seem a bit weird- I wonder what genetic imprint the British Empire left on India/Pakistan.)
I would guess that the British Empire left very little genetic trace indeed… As for Roman Britain, yes, historians will tend to try to find new and interesting things to say – but not by actually making stuff up if the evidence really doesn’t support it. Plenty of historians would, I think, go with the idea that the Romans remained largely separate; the argument about ethnic diversity isn’t that the pasty Britons suddenly became all multi-ethnic, but that they now found themselves as part of a multi-ethnic society by virtue of the arrival of a load of foreign soldiers, administrators, traders etc.
Neville Morley, I’m sorry, you think the British Empire left very little genetic trace? I think this may be a little oversight on your behalf. Indians in Fiji, Anglo-Celts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Malays in South Africa etc etc.
That was specifically in relation to a question about the population of the Indian subcontinent, and whether the British themselves would have had a significant impact on its genetic makeup. Role of Empire in movement of many other peoples indisputable. Sorry that wasn’t clear.
Thanks for response- sorry if I seemed to suggest historians made things up.
Luke, no problem. ‘Make things up’ may be a bit of an exaggeration, but you’re absolutely right that ancient historians and archaeologists do sometimes play up the possible significance of their work (or press officers do it for them, or media reports pick the most sensationalist possibilities). Cf. the recently-discovered bit of Roman town near Vienne in France being described as “the new Pompeii”, skulls found in London *must* be evidence of savagery in Boudiccan revolt etc.
There’s more than a few anglo-indians in india.
Certainly, but as a percentage of total population? I’ve no idea if there are studies on this, but I imagine there are.
All due nods to Sarah Bond, but Isn’t this a case, instead, for your interest in the reception of classical traditions? Maybe the classics painted their marble statues, but the Greeks’ and Romans’ Renaissance imitators did not. The great white statue given to modernity isn’t the Apollo of Belvedere, it’s David.
I don’t think David’s whiteness tells us anything at all about the Renaissance other than they conceived of marble classic art the way they found it: white. The same (inherited) preference – as much about our reception of the Renaissance as of antiquity – needn’t have said anything interesting about us, except pointing to our lack of imagination – until alt-right crazies set out to prove me wrong.
What’s lost in the whole argument is that we have a whole lot of bronze statuary that is a lot closer to black than white. The Greeks did “color” these with alloys and inlays, in some cases, but they seem not to have painted them. Donatello’s David, therefore, may be white-featured, but he is definitely dark-skinned.
Exactly what I was thinking – if marble statues are “white”, then bronze ones are “black” (poor Ephebe of Antikythera). It wasn’t raised as a question, simply because it didn’t fit Sarah E. Bond’s arguments.
Regarding bronzes: just look at one of the ‘Gods in Color’ exhibition catalogues and you will see how colourful bronze statues could have been.
(It is generally advisable to do at least a little bit of actual research [i.e. in case of non-specialists: looking up stuff] before making strong claims.)
Yes, reception, though “and” rather than “instead”. Again, not directly my field of study, but I think the critical point (emphasised in the article) is that belief in the whiteness of marble statues in antiquity persists even after scholars should know better – late C18 onwards, Winckelmann etc – and acquires a load of explicitly racist baggage through the 19th century.
I think immigration is fantastic and would like to see a borderless world in my lifetime but I would prefer it happened after a frank and honest debate…
(1) It seems very unreasonable to describe a statistically representative presentation of Britons in the roman era (almost 100% white) as equivalently political to a statistically unrepresentative one.
(2) “Roman Britain was ethnically diverse” … “it undermines their ideological claim that ethnic diversity is a recent” Quantity and proportions is absolutely central to how the word is used to day. Redefining the word as you do is a bit too convenient.
(3) “a recent and unnatural thing” The word unnatural represents a bit of a straw-man. Certainly some people may have an idea of some semi-supernatural attachment between the “British people” and Britain itself as a geographical entity or a strong attachment to ethnic “purity”. Considerably more, however, see demographic changes as unprecedented (in Europe, if not in other places) in it’s scale and the speed with which it has happened. Clearly this involves both opportunities and risks, costs and benefits. Pretending like things have always “diverse” seems like an attempt to shut down that discussion. Understandably people who want to have that discussion are annoyed.
(4) “reinforcing their belief in a liberal conspiracy of academics, media etc, subjecting everything to the iron rule of political correctness” You and Mary Beard are not exactly doing your best to show that’s not the case.
1. I’ve no idea how one would measure degrees of politicisation. True, showing Romans as white is more likely to be unthinking and showing them as a mixture of ethnicities is more likely to be consciously political. But the former is not unpolitical, even if the politics are unconscious.
2. See comments above. And actually I am less concerned with trying to demonstrate that Roman society was ethnically diverse – as I said, this isn’t news – than with exploring why some people furiously reject this idea.
3. This needs unpacking. Yes, plenty of people see current demographic changes as unprecedented (though the “current” needs definition: post-WWII? last 30 years? last decade?). It’s well established that people tend to over-estimate the degree of change, the proportion of the population that are immigrants etc., but actually I agree that, taken as a whole (e.g. excluding places like London which have been all about immigration for centuries), the experience of the last fifty years has in many ways been unprecedented in scale. Globalisation, and all that. But this is often presented in terms of an absolute contrast between No Foreigners in the past and Millions of Foreigners in the present, which is simply wrong; there is a persistent image of a pure, homogeneous Past Britain that is deployed to suggest that immigration and diversity in the present are not just new but unnatural. Pointing this out is about trying to improve the debates about the state of Brirain today, to ensure that they’re based on truth rather than myth, not trying to shut them down.
4. Nope. ‘Historical correctness’, maybe. This all started because someone claimed it was historically inaccurate to depict a Roman centurion as being of African origin, and that is nonsense that needs to be combatted.
I probably should add a disclaimer. I’m not denying that modern Euro-American history has displayed significant and pervasive racism – I’m just asking whether seeing white as the normal color of a marble statue is a symptom of this condition. Michelangelo found it worthwhile to polish marble intensely – the material was beautiful in itself and deserved a treatment that brought out its best. Michelangelo’s aesthetic might not be the ancients’, but there is nothing wrong, ep ipso, in our preferring it.
It’s the carrying over of an aesthetic preference into conceptions of what the ancient world was like, and in some cases still the legacy of how this alleged whiteness was interpreted in the modern era as revealing the nature of classical culture. Aesthetically, I too prefer white marble – since such preferences are heavily shaped by culture, this isn’t surprising – but I am conscious that this puts me in some undesirable company.
OK – that “carryover” point is important, because getting the past right is important.
Thank you, Professor Morley, for providing a voice of reason, and taking the time to respond to the comments here. This is very important.
“he latest twist in the debate on Roman Britain has been the arrival of the ‘genetics trumps humanistic waffle’** argument, some of them genuinely convinced that science offers a solid foundation of Objective Truth that renders everything else irrelevant,”
Well… yeah. Science, does, in fact, offer objective truth far better than the humanities. That’s why the high IQ people gravitate to our side, and the low IQ people let themselves get fleeced by people like you.
This is creationism for the left. It’s even more intellectually dishonest and more pathetic than the standard creationism offered in the wilds of Alabama.
There’s an important discussion to be had about what different scientific approaches can tell us about different aspects of the past, with different degrees of confidence and certainty, but I don’t think that’s what you’re here for…
As IQ is not actually an objective measurement of intelligence but a social-darwinist attempt to quantify and enumerate based on, in my view, flawed underlying principles of what constitutes intelligence, the whereabouts of those at the higher end of the scale is unimportant.
Furthermore, I would argue that it would only be possible to derive ‘objective truth’ from science if it was possible to quantify every possible variable and work from a data sample that contained ever possible case. Otherwise the selection made by scientists as subjective agents will still have some outcome on the potential results. That is not to say that the probability of the outcomes being a good approximation of ‘objective truth’ is negligible, merely that, to some degree, science has the same openness to revised conclusions based on better evidence and technique as the humanities. The difference between the two is the object of their study and the techniques deployed for its interpretation, not their relative abilities to discern an ‘objective truth’ the definition of which is inherently subjective anyway.
Nah, you’re just being all humanities. 😹😹😹
A couple of points about the NS summary of the Nature paper. 1) They seem to conflate the Danish (DEN 18) group with the Anglo Saxons and suggest that the Vikings were drawn exclusively from the Scandinavian peninsula (Norway and Sweden). Thus, the Vikings had little impact outside of Orkney. However it’s surely impossible to determine whether DEN 18 arrived in Britain with the Anglo Saxons or in later Danish Viking invasions, or indeed both (and indeed the continental localisation of DEN 18 is no closer to the supposed origins of the Anglo-Saxons than, say, GER3 and the northernmost cluster of GER 6).
2) What would the Norman ‘signal’ look like? The Normans were, originally, Vikings (at least the top dogs were) so should have a Scandinavian cluster signature. Given that the Normans were a plantation, many of their co-regionalists would likely belong to a N. French cluster e.g. FRA 17. We also know from the sources that William’s army contained a lot of mercenary troops (from memory Bretons for certain and, I think, people from Flanders). So I can’t see how a distinctive Norman signature is possible. The absence of a Norman signal doesn’t mean it isn’t there, more likely it doesn’t exist as a distinct, detectable entity.
To be fair the original paper (figure 3) shows Vikings coming from Denmark and shows their settlement in Normandy. The Nature paper never actually mentions the Normans. It also draws a distinction between Norse Vikings and Danish Vikings.
Thank you! Very many years since I had any engagement with that period, so it hadn’t struck me.
Several issues and agendas appear to have become entangled in this discussion.
1. Does anyone seriously dispute that the Roman Empire and its administrative and military personnel, top to bottom, were multi-ethnic and/or multiracial?
2. Does anyone seriously dispute that elements of this regime were transferred from one part of the Empire to the other, according to the needs of the Empire’s governors?
Thus we have established the outlines of how individual members of a diversity of ethnicities and races came to be posted in Roman Britain. And let us not forget that these mechanisms persisted for about 400 years.
Most of the transferees in the employ of the Roman Empire were physically fit, well-nourished, well paid, adult males.
3. Is it conceivable that these thousands of transferees over the course of 400 years abjured sexual relations with local women?
4. Or is it possible that female Britons rejected and successfully resisted sexual contact with transferees of the Roman Empire who were darker than a certain hue, thus avoiding for all time on behalf of their progeny the taint of miscegenation?
To state such a proposition exposes the hysteria of denialists who want to believe that their remote female ancestors were as obsessed by race as they are.
Yes, one of the reasons the debate is so bad-tempered and apparently interminable is precisely that different issues are tangled up, and actually it suits some people *not* to untangle them. But the point of my post is that, while specialists would have no problem agreeing with your 1 and 2, there are non-specialists for whom these might come as a surprise, and I don’t think this is necessarily because they’re all card-carrying racists.
Thank you. You discuss the existence of genuine surprise in the popular mind about the nature of the Roman world.
As a non-specialist I am not aware of the historiography of the field of study that ruled out my points 1 and 2 being a surprise.
I imagine there are still many interested and fair minded non-specialists who remain comfortable with old and disproven understandings of the nature of Roman rule, not only in Britain, but also across the entire Roman world.
Once upon a time the Roman Empire was a major topic of school study in British and British Commonwealth countries. That was where and how old interpretations of the Roman world were popularised.
Nowadays, the Roman world, and the opportunity to teach new understandings, have diminished in many curricula. Hence the sometimes combative surprise.
Reblogged this on Rome and all that… and commented:
Because this extensive and thoughtful piece says everything I’d say, but better.
Neville, on re-reading it (genetic traces in India), I see what you meant, I’m afraid I jumped the gun a little. Cheers for the response.
No problem – if you have to re-read it, there’s a good chance it wasn’t clear enough, so good to clarify it.
Thank you – as someone who knows next to nothing about what it meant to be ‘Roman’ in different parts of the Empire, I am now getting really interested in the topic! I also found your analysis of why some people are resistant to new information very interesting, especially the point about previous (even half remembered) education – it’s a much smaller example, but I’ve noticed that some people on the internet become very fierce about mathematics when it is pointed out to them that they have made a error in a simple calculation (a puzzle challenge) because they have not applied the BODMAS rules – they are certain they are right, because they know how to multiply, add, subtract, etc. Rather than look up the procedure for the order of operations and say, “Well I never, I learnt something new today!” their image of themselves as competent and knowledgeable seems to come under such an unbearable level of threat that they become adamant that such a rule does not exist. I think this is such a shame and such a barrier to learning. While the internet is a fantastic resource for learning all kinds of things, it does have a tendency to put people into a ‘fight or flight’ mode – I hope all this recent furore can promote not only interest in Roman Britain, but also in patterns of intelligent discussion and debate.
Thank you for this balanced and informative post. I also found the comment section quite informative.
To me the current debate is ridiculous. As you mention the idea of a multi-ethnic/diverse Roman Empire is an old hat. I think the debate is not about the ethnic make-up of the roman empire in the first place, because this is a non-issue.
There is nothing inherently bad in a multi-ethnic society, I would rather argue it is good for innovation and to overcome our tendency to be uncomfortable when faced with the ‘other’. Somehow this tendency has grown in past years and thus some people project their fear on times long past, mainly to have an argument for the present to not engage with the ‘other’, which they perceive as a threat to their way of life.
I am honestly a bit sad and disappointed that such stuff still comes up and that people always tend to go for extremes. What happened to common sense? What happend to making educated guesses and discussing those in a civilized manner? Often academics are accused of making fuzzy statements, especially in the humanities. Unfortunately that is just the nature of historical research. There are no clear answers and what we know today will be modified and revised in ten years. In the end that makes history and engaging with such topics interesting. Granted, the contemporary views and interpretations of history are equally interesting, I just wished the overall niveau of this discussion would be similar to your reasoned post.
I will say that the Nature study by Leslie et al. looks responsible … I see plenty of qualifications and none of the grandiose claims that people on the Internet are making. But as you say, interpreting this genetic data (or Dr. Green’s data on cemeteries) is not trivial.
I am sorry that the wonders of scientific progress have not yet delivered Dr. Taleb a time machine, so that armed with Google Translate he could go tell Juvenal that people from Latium, Mauretania, Syria, and Gallia Narbonensis are all the same in appearance and blood. I am sure that would go just as well as he hopes 😉
Yes the Nature study is pretty clear about what it can and can’t prove, with varying degrees of confidence – and it is fascinating stuff. Also worth emphasising the aim of that study, which was *not* about tracing all the origins of modern British population but focused on regional clustering, and selected its samples on that basis.
I think the issue is that some people are reading media summaries rather than the original publication. Even the New Scientist piece contains some errors stemming from over-generalisations (or perhaps a lack of historical background). As with history, so with science you have to go to the original source.
Bowden et al. (2007) is an interesting small scale study in Merseyside looking for traces of Norse Vikings fleeing Dublin and settling around the Wirral in 902 CE. Using the criteria similar to those used by others such as Weale et al (2002) the 2007 study was unable to detect any significantly increased Viking signal in the region. However, when they restricted the analysis to individuals with surnames recorded in the area as long ago as the 16th century they found enrichment for the Norse Viking signal.
This shows the type of preparation needed (the preserve of historians) before you can even begin to ask specific questions about the genetic legacy of a region. Essentially if you want to find Roman DNA in British genes you are going to have to identify, by other means, those most likely to have Roman descent. Trying to pick up whispers of ancient DNA in modern British genomes is a big ask likely to be drowned out by noise.
Bowden et al (2007) https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/25/2/301/1129414/Excavating-Past-Population-Structures-by-Surname
Weale et al (2002) https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/19/7/1008/1068561/Y-Chromosome-Evidence-for-Anglo-Saxon-Mass
Thank you! One of the things I hope people who look at this post will get is links to stuff by people a lot more expert in this field than I am, and this definitely adds to the database.
And, yes, the idea that a study like the Welcome one can prove the negative and demonstrate the total absence of anyone of African origin makes no sense except to those determined to find support for the conclusions they’ve already adopted…
Very nice article here about the problems with genetic analysis (especially of potentially small populations many of whom may have been here for only a relatively brief time – wouldn’t you want to go back to sun, sea, wine and olive oil given half the chance?).
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/09/if-africans-were-in-roman-britain-why-dont-we-see-their-dna-today-mary-beard
The question is, in what sense would a Hadrian’s-Wall-building African-origin Roman commander’s family have been “typical,” as the BBC cartoon’s caption claims? That’s doubly silly, in terms of class as well as ethnicity. Was this driven by random PC-ness or by actual knowledge of recondite trivia a la Mary’s Lollius Urbicus? If the former one of your earliest commentators (Maz) may have a point after all, regarding “pandering.” (And who knew that daily life in Roman Britain = gladiators + curses + ‘military scarves’…)
Yes, the caption is deeply unhelpful; as far as I’m aware, that wasn’t written by the team that did the video, so wasn’t informed by any research on the subject. The video (which did draw on the research into different ethnicities in Britain) doesn’t make any claim about typicality or even representativeness, except (arguably) implicitly; my guess would be that, if they’d anticipated this row and sought to devise a phrase to address legitimate queries, then something like “unremarkable” would work – in other words, if you take an upper-class Roman official family (as you’d be tempted to do, in order to incorporate as many aspects of distinctively Roman life as possible) then it’s unremarkable that it might be of mixed ethnicity. Not that every upper-class Roman family was, but given that most other portrayals of the Romans in Britain until very recently were monochrome, it’s not unreasonable to present something of the known variety.
The Wellcome Trust (PoBI) study isn’t the best resource when it comes to determining sub-Saharan levels in the modern British population. However, all studies that *do* pertain to the question clearly show no evidence of sub-Saharan admixture. What little exists certainly exists below the 0.1% level.
As someone primarily versed in genetics, the lack of concord between genetics and archaeology honestly leads me to consider that bone and isotope analyses are simply incorrect, or at least have error margins that coincide with the percentage of bones concluded to be of sub-Saharan descent.
As for not detecting Vikings and Normans etc., this simply isn’t a comparable issue, since finding one type of NW European genes in a different NW European population is considerably more akin to looking for a slightly yellower piece of hay in a giant stack of hay than finding deeply differentiated sub-Saharan genes in a European population.
Here are three separate types of analysis that show the lack of non-European admixture in modern Britons:
https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/32/18/2817/1744074/pong-fast-analysis-and-visualization-of-latent
And, more insightfully, its supplementary material:
https://tinyurl.com/y9pcww8p
Second study:
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/29/11791.full
Third:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6172/747?sid=736c3d26-56ca-4f23-930f-1fdf773fd92d
Thanks for the links. I’m not a geneticist, or indeed a scientist, but I can’t help feeling somewhat sceptical, on philosophical grounds, at rejecting positive results from several different sorts of evidence and analysis on the basis of null results from a different sort of evidence. It’s surely at least as likely that the null result derives from the sampling method or margins of error, given that we wouldn’t *expect* there to be a major contribution of sub-Saharan DNA to modern British population, just not none.
Ah, I didn’t actually link to the supplementary information, but rather the PDF version. The SP needs to be downloaded, so I just took a screenshot you can find here:
Red represents sub-Saharan African ancestry, blue represents non-African ancestry. Initials from left to right mean Esan (who are African), African Americans, African Caribbeans, European Americans from Utah, Tuscans, Finns, Britons, Iberians, and Gujarati Indians. Other populations didn’t fit on the screen shot.
Amusingly, Britons are the only European population that shows zero sub-Saharan African red, making them even beat Finns in this regard (since one Finn has some African red). Not shown on the screen shot, but one Chinese even shows African red.