The Luxury Habit That Killed The Roman Elite’s Children

Archaeologists excavating the site of a settlement near the Dutch coast were intrigued to discover hundreds of skeletal remains of newborn babies. When looking at so many children's burials in one place, of course, some of the first questions are, is this evidence for infanticide? Were these the innocent victims of war, a rebel uprising, or were they left to die in a time of great need? Archaeologist Liesbeth Smits worked on the original excavation of the Roman cemetery. She has decided to return to the site to reinvestigate the mystery of these infant deaths. 18% of the whole population died under the age of one year. In fact, almost half of the population died under the age of 20 years. Using the latest forensic techniques and expert analysis, Liesbeth is determined to discover what happened here. Valkenburg, Holland. Two thousand years ago, this bleak windswept coastline represented the furthest northern outpost of the Roman Empire on mainland Europe. It was under the rule of the famously insane Emperor Caligula when the Roman Empire spread from the Nile in North Africa across the Middle East and most of continental Europe through what is now Spain, France and Germany till it reached the distant shore of present-day Holland. At this time, Valkenburg was a community made up of native people as well as a small garrison of Roman soldiers. When, in modern times, archaeologists came to excavate this site, they unearthed a cemetery that held amazing secrets. They discovered over 450 burial remains. Of this number, 130 were skeletal inhumations or burials, the rest were cremations. But it was the age profile of the dead that astonished the archaeologists. About 100 of the total remains discovered, almost a fifth, turned out to be the skeletal remains of children. For us, it's really strange to look at that kind of phenomenon and I want to find out what could have been the influence on these high mortality rates. What happened here to cause so many premature deaths? Who were these babies? Were they native children or Romans? Did they die en masse at the hands of an enemy? Did they succumb to disease? Or were they the victims of mass infanticide? The first thing Lisbeth wants to do is take a look at the bones for herself. She heads off to Amersfoort, where the human remains from the Valkenburg cemetery are kept. The collection, amounting to thousands of bones, is stored in a cool climatic warehouse. What's extraordinary about Valkenburg is that so many baby bones have survived. Usually the tiny bones of infants disintegrate in the ground over time. She pays particular attention to the remains of the children. She makes a meticulous and detailed examination of their long bones and teeth to find out exactly how old these children were when they died. The results are surprising. There are about 100 children's graves and from that number most of them are the graves of newly borns. Almost one fifth of the populations that died in the first year they were born and that's really extraordinary. Of the 114 children buried at Valkenburg, 90 died under the age of a year. What had happened here? Lisbeth now looks at the bones for an explanation as to why so many died so young. I studied the bones of the whole skeleton of course to look for any signs of disease but that's most of the time you can't see anything which can give you a clue to the cause of death. Because these children died so young there wouldn't have been enough time for disease to affect the bones. It will take a long time to affect the skeleton and when it's a disease which kills quickly you won't see it on the skeleton at all. So from that I didn't have a lot of evidence for the cause of death. There are no signs of disease and at first glance there appear to be no signs of violence or trauma. X-rays of the bones confirm that these children didn't die a violent death. What was it that killed them? In search of more clues, Lisbeth returns to the site of the original excavation. The cemetery site lies alongside a modern highway. In Roman times this was the main route to the fortress settlement of Praetorium Agrippinae. If Lisbeth is to find out why these children died then some detail about life here in Roman times may shed some light. She meets Roman historian and anthropologist Karen Wall. She has studied the site in depth and may be able to shed some light on this bizarre mystery. It's very hard to imagine it now when you see all the traffic and where we're standing but this was actually the edge of the Roman Empire in those days. The site was in use during a period of over 200 years dating back to about AD 40 when the Romans first arrived. The occupying force would have step by step begun mixing with the locals for business and for pleasure. Volkenberg became a vibrant community of Roman soldiers, farmers and coastal traders. Of course from before the Roman period there would be rural settlements in this area. The Romans coming to the fort would have brought their families, there would have been traders, there would have been the natives who'd come and settle alongside in the hope of doing business with the fort. Of course. The soldiers themselves would have gradually had native families. But who was buried in the cemetery? Were they local or were they Romans? The way the dead were buried provides a clue. What you're finding right from the beginning of the fort, the establishing of the fort in the mid-1st century right through to the end of the 2nd century, cremation is very much the most popular. It stays there the whole period. There are differences within that ritual, the general pattern is cremation. The Romans then favoured cremation as a funereal rite. So it's almost certain then that the cremations on this site were of Roman citizens. But why were there 41 adult skeletal burials here? What's intriguing is that they don't seem to have been treated with any respect. The adults, what's very interesting is they don't seem to have been buried with any really due care or any proper ritual. They just seem to have been thrown into shallow pits, sometimes on their stomach or sometimes on their back, in all directions, no clear orientation. So it's very unusual and it's very unclear for us what that actually means. But it's a very small group towards the end of the 2nd century. Presumably these adult burials were not of Romans. They may have been the dumped bodies of criminals. But the fact that these few burials dated from a particular time period suggest a connection with a specific event, perhaps a revolt, and that these were insurgents killed by the Roman occupiers. Would such an insurgents explain the deaths of the children buried at Valkenburg? The Roman period itself was a period of enormous instability in certain periods. And sometimes the questions are asked, are we looking at violence? Is there any evidence for conflict in the area? Ironically, being so near a fort would suggest that it was a fairly safe area to live. We actually have very little evidence in the graves to suggest that there was conflict. There was no suggestion for wounds or death in battle. It was something else that caused the demise of so many youngsters. But were they Roman, and if they were, why weren't they cremated? What you see is a general pattern here, but also in other cemeteries, is that the children below the age of 18, and particularly infants and neonatals, they were always buried. They were never cremated. But why so many? Karen has her suspicions. When looking at so many children's burials in one place, of course, some of the first questions are, is this an evidence for infanticide? Infanticide was widespread in Roman society. One grisly case was in Ashkelon on the southern coast of Israel, where archaeologists excavating around a late Roman early Byzantine brothel discovered the remains of nearly 100 newborn baby boys. They showed no signs of disease or skeletal malformation, suggesting infanticide rather than a catastrophe. These boys may have been discarded in favour of girls, who would become the next generation of courtesans in the brothel. Some other ancient cultures would sacrifice their children. The Aztecs would sacrifice children to the gods as a plea for good harvests. The Inuits of Greenland left babies out to perish in the snow and ice when starvation threatened the community. Could it be that the Valkenburg children were also deliberately killed during a time of crisis? The manner of these babies' burials does not suggest abandonment. They were not discarded or cast into a sewer. They were interred carefully, some even with food and toys, for their journey into the afterlife. We do find in a lot of the burials here that they did have grave gifts, just like some of the adults' pots were possibly food and drink. Even in one of the baby graves was found a little drinking bottle, which is, you know, quite a sad thing to find, really, even now. It's obvious that these babies weren't done away with deliberately. Their deaths were huge tragedies. But what was it that was killing them? The only thing which is left to do is look at the components of the bones to analyse the chemical elements of the bones and see if that can give any evidence of what happened. A high-tech analysis of the chemical components of the bones may reveal not only what killed these babies, but also what could have played a part in the downfall of the Roman Empire. Archaeologist Lisbeth Smits is trying to find out why such a high proportion of babies were buried in the Roman cemetery at Volkenberg, Holland. Having studied the bones, Lisbeth has ruled out disease or violence as cause of death. She now wants to analyse the chemical make-up of the bone material to see if that might hold some clues. She calls on one of Holland's most eminent scientists, Frederik de Wolf, Professor of Clinical and Forensic Toxicology. He is often asked to help crack modern murder cases, but today he has come to help solve this ancient mystery. He has arranged for isotope analysis to be made on the infant bones at Leiden Hospital. This cutting-edge technique will reveal what chemicals were absorbed into their bodies. What you have done so far is to analyse the bones which were taken from the graves of children who died at a very young age or were stillborn. And what we found was that the concentration of lead in the bone of these children was very, very high. The first thing Professor de Wolf needed to do was compare the quantity of lead in the Roman babies with that of stillborn babies from the local area today. What we did is to analyse lead... He takes Lisbeth through the astonishing results he's found. Because the lead content in those Roman children, there was a lead content which is about 50 times as much as in contemporary children. Could lead, a very toxic substance, have caused these infant deaths? Lead is a very nasty poison. It can cause a wide range of complaints, of pathology. Lead affects almost every part of the body. The kidneys, the nervous and reproductive systems. Anemia, epilepsy, kidney malfunction and insanity are among the symptoms. It may have affected the sanity of emperors such as Caligula, who is thought to have suffered from encephalitis, a disease that many believe can be caused by lead poisoning. It's particularly harmful to the developing brains of foetuses and young children and can cause them seizure, comas and ultimately death. The use of lead can be dated as far back as 8,000 years. Easy to extract from rock, it was favoured because it melted at low temperatures and was easily malleable. And in Roman times, lead was everywhere. The Romans used it for water pipes and to fashion all sorts of everyday objects. Kitchen utensils, pots and pans, it was even added to makeup and to food. Although some people suspected the dangers of lead, most were happy to use it regardless, unaware that they were slowly poisoning themselves. Although this widespread use of lead in Roman times is well documented, possible evidence of lead poisoning in this area has come as a surprise to the experts. We know that people in the Roman Empire and especially in Rome itself were heavily exposed to lead. But we never knew that lead exposure was so high in this part, the northern part of the Roman Empire. Professor De Wolf isn't convinced that the babies ingested all this lead during their brief lives and considers another explanation. Was lead absorbed into the bones from the soil in which they were buried? It could also be that the lead in these bone samples was concentrated from lead in the soil surrounding the bones. It's possible that the cemetery soil had a high lead content and lead wasn't to blame for the babies' deaths after all. The structure of human bone is such that it easily concentrates lead from the environment. It works like a kind of sponge. Yeah, that's right, exactly. Professor De Wolf now organises analysis of the soil in which the children were buried. He wants to compare the lead type found in the bones with that found in the soil. The results of the study are conclusive. What results we got back were really fascinating. We were thrilled because it clearly demonstrated that the lead which was present in the bone of these children was from a different source than from the Dutch soil. The lead definitely got into the babies' bodies during their lifetime, more than likely through the mother. However, the mothers would surely have been unaware of the harm they were doing. They wouldn't have noticed the symptoms of lead poisoning in their own bodies until later in life. 90% of any lead consumed by an adult will leave their body as natural wastage. Children's bodies, on the other hand, will take up about half of what they ingest because of growth and development. Unborn babies are even more vulnerable. Tragically, the children were being slowly poisoned by the lead in their mothers' bodies both before and after they were born. They also used lead, for instance, as a preservative to food products, a stewed food. And they used it to sweeten wine and to preserve wine with it. Liesbeth's next line of inquiry is to explore the idea that lead in the wine and food was to blame. I want his specialist advice about food and food preparation in Roman times because it seems that the ingestion of lead by way of the food chain might be a serious threat to the health of the people. She's come to Amsterdam's Museum of Antiquities. She hopes Roman ethnographer and food expert René van Beek will be able to shed some light. Surrounded by the kind of pots and utensils that would have been used by the citizens of Valkenburg, Liesbeth explains what it is she needs to know. We think that the food is a very important factor in the lead uptake by the mother of these children. So can you tell me something about the food the Romans used and how the lead could have been absorbed during life, during pregnancy by these infants, by these foetuses? René believes that it wasn't really what the people were eating that was to blame as their diet was extremely healthy. It was more likely to be the dishes that they used every day. For example, when you see this, the small beakers they used for drinking wine and for these buckets they used for getting water. You see that all these things are made of bronze and, well, in bronze, of course, there is a lot of lead which was toxic. The Romans were cooking with bronze pots, eating off bronze plates, drinking from bronze cups and all the time they were soaking up lead. But they sometimes made even more concentrated contact. For example, you see some points in this small plate, for example, here, you see it was repaired. It's an ancient repair which was made with lead, real lead, not solder made with lead, but real lead. Pure lead? Pure lead. So that meant that when people were using this plate for preparing their food, for eating, etc., the lead was in direct contact with the food. But they were getting another daily dose of lead by another means. An essential part of Roman cuisine was a syrup called difrutum or sacca, a sweetener and preservative. It was made by boiling down unfermented grape juice to produce a sweet concentrate. Lead kettles were deliberately used as the lead enhanced the sweetness. The acidity of the grapes would also have helped the lead leach from the pot into the syrup. And when they cooked this wine in these bronze cooking pans, then you can see that there is, of course, a lot of lead coming from the object into the wine. And lead made the thing sweet. This highly toxic syrup, difrutum, was then added to all manner of food and drink. And the widely used cookbook of 3rd century Apicius even called for difrutum to be added to as many as a fifth of his recipes. Cook tuna fillet, mash tuna fillet together with dates, difrutum, fry veal in olive oil until well done, mix raisins, wine, difrutum. Difrutum was also used as a preservative, enabling foodstuff to be conserved and distributed to the troops across the empire. This highly toxic substance was infiltrating the cream of Roman society, causing, among other things, infertility and high infant mortality. Some scholars believe that lead poisoning was a contributory factor to the collapse of Roman power. Well, we know that Romans through the whole empire were heavily exposed to lead, especially those who could afford a lot of wine were heavily exposed. And we may conclude from the findings obtained so far that this may have played a very important role also in the decline of the Roman empire. But not everyone concurs with this theory. Rennie agrees that the amount of lead in Roman life was extremely dangerous, but remains uncertain as to exactly what effect it had. Of course, there was a lot of lead, there was too much lead. So there was too big risk, you can say. And I agree with that for sure. On the other hand, it is always risk as well to say that the decline and fall of the Roman empire was because of the lead. But for sure, there was too much lead. That's the conclusion we can draw. It's now clear to Liesbeth that lead was everywhere in Roman life, in water, wine, food eaten from bronze plates, and even in a nursing mother's milk. The babies of Volkenburg didn't stand a chance. All the evidence I have now points to the fact that it's very probable that the lead poisoning could have been the major cause of death of these infants. This lead would have been ingested during pregnancy and was transmitted by the mother to the child. The deaths of the Volkenburg children were totally unpremeditated. Whether or not their demise can be linked to the greater demise of the Roman empire is still a matter for conjecture. But what we are certain of is that they were the unwitting victims of a privileged way of life. The nightmare of Volkenburg was that while the mothers enjoyed a rich and varied diet, they never knew that it was loaded with poison. A poison so deadly that it took their children from them and never gave them answers as to why.