Join us for the first Lunch Club of spring quarter through Zoom!! 

An ever-growing wealth of evidence makes clear today that malaria was present in Roman Italy. It is therefore surprising that little work has been done regarding malaria’s impact on and interaction with Romans and Roman society overall, especially considering that malaria is among the most consequential diseases to have afflicted humankind. Wherever prevalent, this disease invariably increases mortality and morbidity rates and depresses economic growth. It also engenders and reinforces socio-political struggles and inequalities. In my dissertation I am addressing this shortcoming by considering the materiality of malaria and its transmission. Inspired by the tenets of entanglement theory, social epidemiology, and landscape epidemiology, all of which emphasize the interdependence of living and non-living things, I examine how the creation, use, maintenance, and dilapidation of artifacts both inhibited and promoted disease in the past. I do so specifically by studying the histories of villa estates in Roman central Italy (2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE) and their constituent hydraulic infrastructure (built water channels and cisterns), and how these artifacts, in tandem with the local environment and human practices, bounded malaria’s distribution, affected its prevalence, and ultimately exposed Romans to this disease. In doing so, I argue, we can better learn malaria’s ancient distribution and prevalence, and thus historical significance, and at the same time gain a tangible and productive understanding of human-environment-disease relationships in the past.

David Pickel is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Classics at Stanford University, with research interests in Roman villas, the archaeology of health and disease, and malaria. He received a B.A. in Classical Archaeology from Florida State University (2012), and an M.A. in Classics from the University of Arizona (2015). David is currently Director of Excavations for the Villa Romana di Poggio Gramignano Archaeological Project, a multidisciplinary research project that aims to better understand the Augustan-period (1st century BCE) villa at Poggio Gramignano and its related Late Roman (5th century CE) infant and child cemetery, both located along the Tiber river near the Umbrian city of Lugnano in Teverina, Italy.

Zoom details will be available shortly. For questions, please contact Jessica.