Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. An Author Correction to this article was published on 11 November This study challenges historical paradigms using a large-scale integrated bioarchaeological approach, focusing on the female experience over the last 2, years in Milan, Italy.
Specifically, skeletons from the osteological collection of Milan were used to elucidate female survivorship and mortality by integrating bioarchaeological and paleopathological data, paleoepidemiological analyses, and historical contextualization. Significant sex-specific differences in mortality risk and survivorship were observed: females had higher mortality risk and lower survivorship in the Roman first-fifth century AD and Modern 16thth century AD eras, but this trend reversed in the contemporary period 19thth century AD.
Cultural and social factors negatively impacted female mortality in Roman and modern Milan, while others buffered it during the Middle Ages sixthth century AD. This study underscored the importance of bioarchaeological inquiries in reconstructing the past, providing answers that may challenge historical assumptions and shedding light on how the interplay of cultural, social, and biological factors shaped the female experience across millennia.
Historical, archaeological, and iconographic sources constitute our main source of knowledge relating to the past, the foundation on which our understanding of history is built. Yet, this source is not without its biases and limitations. One of these is that women are much less prevalent in and authoring written sources than men, thus skewing the narrative.
This may in part be explained by the fact that many such documents are public sources and account for historical and political events from which women were mostly excluded 1 , 2 , 3. However, written sources are not the only source of information related to the past: indeed, material culture can help overcome the limitations of written sources and uniquely complete them.
