In the meantime, I have just finished writing all the thank-you cards and will be shipping out the remaining rewards this week.  If you haven’t gotten your card and/or reward within the next couple of weeks, please drop me an email with your name and address, and I’ll make sure it gets there.

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Feel free to use the comments to start a discussion, give me pointers about interviewing, or ask questions!

Goal 1 – Use mtDNA analysis to more fully understand the demographics of the population of Imperial Rome.  For this pilot phase of the project, we’ll be looking at mitochondrial DNA to learn more about the maternal genetic lines of the Romans - both the locals and the people that previous isotope study suggested were immigrants.  Very broadly, mtDNA (which is passed on, unchanged, from mother to daughter) will give us additional information about the geographic backgrounds of the people buried in the two cemetery populations, contributing further to discussions about demography in Rome.  We expect to find mostly central European haplogroups, but there may be some African, Iberian, and Near Eastern genes.  In combination with the previous Sr/O/Pb (and to some extent C) isotopes, though, we may be able to say with more confidence that a particular person originated in North Africa, Spain, Asia Minor, etc.  Depending on the data produced, we’ll learn more about the origins of the population of Imperial Rome (tracing it back multiple generations) and the origins of specific people at Rome (immigrants or possibly one generation removed).

Goal 2 – Use mtDNA analysis to investigate the genetic diversity of the Republican population of Rome.  In addition to learning more about the genetic background of the Imperial population, we plan to look at a sample of people from the earlier Republican period.  A new theory has been proposed recently about the Roman Republic, with the suggestion that the population was highly mobile rather than sedentary peasants – perhaps even as mobile as people were in the Empire.  Looking at mtDNA from the Republican samples (combined with previous Sr/O isotopes) will tell us a lot about the geographic origins of the population, namely whether there was significant gene influx prior to the Empire.  Granted, the Republican sample is a small one, but the data that result should be of great interest to classical historians and demographers and will pave the way for future studies of Republican-era skeletons.

Goal 3 – Use mtDNA analysis to learn more about female mobility in the Empire.  We’re also choosing mtDNA for this pilot phase specifically because it’s inherited from one’s mother.  The mobility of females is a popular question in classics – many people think that women weren’t often taken as slaves and that they didn’t have the freedom to move like men did.  My recent EAA paper compared Sr/O data from M1s and M3s of female immigrants to Rome; I found that women did move, and that some moved multiple times during their lives.  Another interesting question that this DNA project will start to answer is about genetic diversity among males and females.  The Roman family was often neolocal in residence (the nuclear family lived separately) but patrilocal in burial (people were buried with their father’s/father-in-law’s family).  In a Roman burial context, we might expect more genetic diversity in females who were marrying into a family.  But more men moved around the Empire because of the military and slavery, so a cemetery population may have more diversity in males, especially if the cemetery was specifically for slaves.  Eventually, it would be great to do some Y-DNA testing, to look into the genetic diversity of males as well.  But the mtDNA will give us a good head-start on answering questions of sex-specific mobility.

Future Goal – Use DNA, isotope, and palaeopathological analysis to answer questions about disease ecology.  Malaria has long been a topic of interest to classicists; some DNA work has been done in the past (see, for example, Sallares’ 2002 book Malaria and Rome) and shows that it’s possible to identify P. falciparum, the organism that causes malaria, within a skeleton.  DNA analysis, though, could also let me look for genetic anemias like thalassemia, sickle-cell, and G6PD, which confer some protection from malaria and were likely common in the Mediterranean.  Interestingly, I recently charted the oxgyen isotope ratios for people with and without porotic hyperostosis, a bone pathology resulting from anemia, and there is a statistical correlation between high oxygen ratios and presence of porotic hyperostosis.  Higher oxygen ratios mean warmer climates, and may also mean geographical areas with higher (or different) parasite loads.  There’s definitely promise in looking at the disease ecology of Rome/Italy at a molecular level, so I’m hoping that we successfully extract DNA in this pilot phase.

And I’ve received a dozen or more emails today from people as excited as I am about this project, offering their encouragement, lab services, expertise, and knowledge about the ancient world.  I will respond to all of them, I promise, but it might take a few days!

Again, thank you – all of you reading this – for making this project a reality!

The people whose DNA we will study are an unknown population: without inscriptions, without historical records, without grave goods, all that can be said is they were of the lower-class, which composed just under 99% of the population of Rome.  These were average people – men, women, children… free, enslaved, freed… workers, parents, subjects of Imperial power.

The title of this website – the Roman DNA Project – is then a bit of a misnomer.  We’re not going to know if we’ve found “Roman” DNA, but it’s also impossible to say what “Roman” DNA would be since that changed quite often over the duration of the Republic and Empire.  What we will get is DNA from people buried at Rome, which is pretty cool in itself.

What is new, though, is using crowdfunding to support archaeological science.  The first project I saw to use this method was Colleen Morgan’s Maenander Project, which raised over $5,000 to support archaeological excavation in Turkey.  Since I launched the Roman DNA Project, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about my reasons for using crowdfunding to raise money for my research.  There are actually several factors that encouraged me to become involved in crowdfunding in general and in the #SciFund Challenge in particular.  In no specific order:

• I got my PhD last year but haven’t landed an academic position yet, as the job market for bioarchaeologists has taken a nose-dive since the early-to-mid 2000′s.  Sometimes the job market feels like a catch-22 – like you need to have a research project to get a job, but you need the academic affiliation a job provides you to apply for grant funding for your project.  There are granting opportunities for independent or adjunct scholars like myself, and I’ve applied for them (such as the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship through Wenner-Gren and a summer stipend through the NEH), but not having a permanent affiliation means I can’t apply for many large research grants.  Crowdfunding is therefore a great way to launch a research project that I’m incredibly excited about without waiting until I am tenure-track faculty.

• The funding situation for science in the U.S. is bleak at the moment, with government- and state-level budget cuts lessening the pool of money available to fund researchers.  I’ve received money for previous research from granting agencies, but the time between submission of a proposal and (successful) funding is often quite long. In anthropology, it might be a year between the submission of a grant application and successful funding.  If your proposal is unsuccessful, you’re back at square one, and have to spend more time applying for money.  Another problem is that, even though many anthropologists are doing cutting-edge science, as a discipline we’re fairly poorly funded because we’re not a “hard” science.  Submitting the Roman DNA Project through a crowdfunding site is an interesting way of raising money outside of the traditional bounds of academic/governmental granting agencies.  I don’t think crowdfunding can fully replace the traditional avenues of science funding, since our best bet to raise $20,000-100,000 for an archaeological dig or other large-scale project is still through NSF, Wenner-Gren, or NEH, but it’s an excellent way of drumming up financial and moral support for a pilot project, which might in turn generate enough data to make a larger grant easier to get.

• I’m committed to bringing science to the public, and I try to communicate my passion for my research through multiple media: in print in academic journals, of course, but also through blogging (at PoweredByOsteons.org and as a guest blogger elsewhere), tweeting, and public talks (you can catch me at Middle Tennessee State University on Wednesday at 4pm!).  I’ve had an online presence for years, but I’ve never directly engaged the public in my research.  Joining the #SciFund Challenge seemed the perfect way to do this – to bring my research to the people who are most interested in it and to convince them to become stakeholders in the process of science.

The short answer, then, to the question, “Why crowdfunding?” is that joining #SciFund with a bunch of other scientists seemed like a great way to jumpstart my professional career with a research project that the public might be quite interested in supporting.  With over $1,600 raised in less than a week and with people tweeting and sharing the project all over the internet, I’m thrilled that people are intrigued by my project and am really looking forward to carrying out this research.

At the end of the campaign, this blog will become password protected so that my supporters can access news and developments.  If you want to get updates, please consider donating to the project – just $10 gets your name on the donors page and access to blog and Twitter feeds.