Late Roman Changes in Dietary Patterns
By the 4th/5th century, changes in dietary patterns were underway after a long period of stability in the early Empire. There were two general shifts that had a geographical disposition in to the Mediterranean region and northern Europe respectively. In the Mediterranean, the high sheep and goat bone percentages that were well established in the eastern provinces are seen increasingly in the western Mediterranean as well. Spain, Provence, North Africa and Italy all have more assemblages with higher percentages of sheep and goat bones (Fig. 19; Table 6), and in many cases the representation of goats vis-à-vis sheep increased as well, together with a shift to keeping more adult flocks and herds. Sheep and goats, therefore, became a more obvious facet of the agricultural economy, usually at the expense of pig herding. In Italy, rural sites appear to have experienced this trend before urban communities, which were able to preserve the old pattern of diet for longer.
North of the Alps, there was a trend towards increased beef consumption, seen in Germany, Gaul and Britain. It may also be seen on some sites in Provence and in parts of Asia Minor. In Germany and Britain, sites with high pig percentages become uncommon, although this tendency was weaker in Gaul. All these regions, however, retained their distinctiveness, for instance in the case of Britain still having greater mutton and goat meat consumption than Gaul or Germany. The trend to eating more beef and raising more cattle was a shift in emphasis rather than a smothering of earlier dietary patterns.
It is not easy to account for these changes. There was a climatic shift at this time towards a cooling of c. 1 degree Celsius in summer temperatures, that took place in the early 4th century and climaxed in the mid-5th century, according to Alpine glacier and other evidence (Patzelt 1994; Greene 1986, 83). This was probably not enough to trigger major dietary change, and even in fragile marginal a reas such as the Libyan pre-desert, climatic change is discounted as a factor in shifts in the pattern of agriculture (Gilbertson 1996, 293-7). Social and economic factors are likely to have been more significant, but do not lend themselves to simple causative elements in dietary change. In general, however, the loosening fabric of the Roman Empire probably led to greater regionalization in the economies of the provinces, and an emerging divide between the north and the Mediterranean in terms of their diet and agriculture.
Pork-rich diets such as those of Rome and its hinterland, that reflected a concentration of wealth and were essentially a by-product of imperial exploitation of the provinces, were no longer sustainable, and waned in the late Roman period. It was a pattern of diet that only re-emerged at the early medieval (late 4th-9th century) royal site of Tournai (Lentacker 1994), and in wealthy Christian communities in the Middle Ages (King 1997, 400; Columeau 1991, 76-7): it seems to have been the medieval church that was the principal inheritor of the classic 'Roman' dietary pattern. Elsewhere, the effects were more muted, as regions developed their own post-Roman patterns of diet, often reverting to pre-Roman percentages, as seen in Spain and Britain. The most dramatic shifts were in North Africa, where the dietary prohibitions of Islam brought about significant adjustments in the meat diet.