Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 47 (2023) 103819 2352-409X/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Approaching life (in)equality and social transformations in Eastern Attica from the Classical to the Roman era Anna Karligkioti a, b, * , Kerasia Douni c , Maria Mexi c , Panagiota Michailidi c , Efthymia Nikita a a Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, 2121 Aglantzia, Nicosia, Cyprus b Fitch Laboratory, The British School at Athens, 10676 Athens, Greece c Ephorate of Antiquities of Eastern Attica, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, 11741 Athens, Greece A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Bioarchaeology Classical antiquity Eastern Attica Greece Roman Palaeopathology ABSTRACT Even though Classical Antiquity in Greece has been extensively studied in relation to its history and archaeology, bioarchaeological studies for this period are extremely few, focusing mostly on urban populations of major cities, such as Athens and Corinth. Little is known for the people in the periphery of the polis of Athens. Humans are physical mediators of the interaction of cultural and natural phenomena, thus, by combining osteoarchaeological evidence of life quality with mortuary data and historical information, valuable insights can be gained regarding the biological dimensions of socio-political transformations diachronically. The current paper examines health inequalities in what are considered to be rural populations coming from East and South-East Attica, who temporally span the Classical and Roman periods. Results suggest that the populations of Eastern Attica were afficted by increased hardship diachronically. Physiological stress affected equally both sexes; similarly, no sex differentiation in manual labor was attested for the Classical period, but males were more mechanically stressed than females in the Roman era. Juveniles were less frail during earlier periods but adults were more mechanically stressed during the Classical period compared to Roman times. 1. Introduction Bioarchaeological studies exploring assemblages dating to Classical Antiquity in Greece are very scarce. Existing research has traditionally focused on specifc case studies, rather superfcially attempting to integrate human skeletal material and the respective archaeological and historical context (reviews in Lagia, 2015; Nikita and Triantaphyllou, 2017). Furthermore, research has concentrated principally on Classical and Hellenistic groups of important urban centers, leaving the rest of the Greek world and the Roman period largely unexplored. Among the key studies focused on important urban centers, Lagia (2014, 2015) investigated health differentiation in relation to gender and social groups in the classical polis of Athens, being one of the frst scholars to approach health and dietary patterns of different social classes, examining assemblages from cemeteries in Athens and Laurion. Moreover, Fox (2004), Bourbou (2005) and Vanna (2010) tried to associate social and biological status in elite populations from Helle- nistic and Roman era Corinth, Crete and Demetrias, respectively, ana- lysing different pathological conditions. More recently, studies have started integrating different lines of evidence, such as activity-related skeletal changes and dental pathologies, to identify sex-related differ- ences (Michael et al., 2017; Vergidou et al., 2021, 2022), investigate the impact of Roman colonization in Greece (Petry, 2020; Vergidou et al., 2021, 2022), or examine the impact of urbanism on health and diet (Moles, 2019), often contextualizing biological data with material cul- ture and textual sources. Important are also studies that approach as- pects of life quality diachronically, such as the one by Nikita et al. (2019) in the cemetery of Akraiphia, which combined skeletal indicators on mobility, (physiological and mechanical) stress, and pathology with historical evidence to explore shifts in living conditions from the Archaic to the post-Roman era. Finally, an increasing number of projects on historical period assemblages has employed biomolecular methodolo- gies. For example, Vika and colleagues (2009), Borstad and colleagues (2018), Dotsika and Michael (2018), Tritsaroli and Ziogana (2018), and Ganiatsou et al. (2022) have explored diet through isotopic analysis in Hellenistic and Roman Greece. Although the above studies are beginning to approach the largely unexplored life of the Graeco-Roman world in the Aegean, little is still * Corresponding author at: Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, 2121 Aglantzia, Nicosia, Cyprus. Fitch Laboratory, The British School at Athens, 10676, Athens, Greece. E-mail address: a.karligkioti@cyi.ac.cy (A. Karligkioti). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jasrep https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103819 Received 18 October 2022; Received in revised form 9 December 2022; Accepted 28 December 2022