Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Sean Manning]

I'd never heard about that! - although bioarchaeology tends to make my mind glaze over... Is this people everywhere, or just some people?

I have heard "people buried towards the end of Roman rule tend to be smaller and sicker than people buried afterwards" from three or four people interested in different parts of Late Antiquity and nobody I have talked to has contradicted it. Bioarchaeologists of the Principate tend to be torn between wonder ("they farmed fish that we can't farm and made farmed game a once-a-month dish for shopkeepers!") and disgust (cemeteries where every adult had terrible eye and oral health outside the legion camp at Lauriacum, urban archaeologists who suspect that Roman clay toilet pipes leaked into the surrounding walls of those wonderful six-story buildings). Again, its not my speciality, but Late Antiquity is his, so I would expect him to have more to say to people like Steve Muhlberger and Benjamin Isaacs who are pretty cynical of the benefits of Late Roman civilization,

Anyways, I am just talking about general issues because I don't know anything about Alaric Halsall gives me the impression that there are people who try to hide the extent to which urban, complex society collapsed in the western provinces in the fifth century, so Ward-Perkins is speaking to them, just not to people like Steve Muhlberger or Walter Goffart.