This volume arises out of a round table discussion investigating the possibility of identifying the social and professional status of the dead by means of physical anthropology. Traditionally, funerary monuments and grave goods have provided information about the deceased, but their usefulness is limited and such data are not always available. More recently, it has been recognised that human remains themselves could potentially tell us something about the life of the deceased; markers of poor diet and physical stress could indicate something about social status, and damage to bones and joints could be linked to work, although the identification of such markers needs an understanding of working practices and their potential impact on the body. With this in mind, the organiser of this meeting sought to bring together a wide range of researchers, including anthropologists, paleopathologists, archaeologists, historians, art historians and philologists, in order to explore the new opportunities and interpretations offered by this approach. The admirable aim was to promote more interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue in this area, encouraging new avenues of research. The result is a slim but useful volume with a diverse set of contributions written in French, English and Italian, representing a range of disciplines and methodologies. Perhaps inevitably in a volume of this nature, some of the contributions are more closely aligned to the editor's professed aim than others, although all are interesting in their own right.

The editor provides an introductory chapter setting out the methodologies and perspectives of the round table meeting. G. points out how little we can currently learn about artisans from the funerary material, despite the fact that such artisans must have constituted a significant proportion of the population in any Greek or Roman urban centre. The reasons for this could perhaps have been discussed more fully here, particularly the issue of how far artisans could afford inscribed funerary monuments and grave goods, and whether they would in fact have wanted their occupation to be the thing for which they were remembered, but G. is right to emphasise the possibilities offered by a closer analysis of the skeletal material. The four chapters that make up the final section of the book (‘corps et travail’) are most relevant here. P. Charlier, for example, a Forensic Scientist, applies forensic techniques of identification to the field of osteo-archaeology in order to consider exactly how far the physical activity of an individual can be reconstituted from complete or partial skeletons. He focuses in particular on child labour, where the impact of work on skeletal development can be more clearly identified, as well as providing three case studies. Two of these relate to recently deceased individuals, where analysis of the remains can be compared with what we know of their lives, and one relates to seventh-century bodies excavated in Romania.

This is followed by a study of markers of occupational stress in skeletons from Classical and Hellenistic Thasos, an area particularly associated with maritime activity in this period. Analysis was carried out on 57 skeletons from Thasos in 2006, and one of the markers that researchers were looking for was the presence of external auditory exostoses, multiple benign bony growths linked to repeated exposure of the ear to cold water environments (below 19 °C). It was hypothesised that these would be fairly common in the Thasos skeletons, particularly since these were excavated close to the shoreline and could be expected to have a link with the maritime environment. However, only a single incidence was identified and this was in an older male, who died around 55–60 years of age. His bones and teeth also showed some indicators of early life stress and his vertebrae showed damage caused by heavy load-bearing activity. In short, this was the skeleton of a robust, very physically-active individual. A comparative ethnographic study of craftsmen working on traditional wooden boats offers a possible explanation for this single incidence of external auditory exostoses. This study of nine male individuals of different age groups demonstrates that workers specialised in different tasks, with one worker specialising in diving; similar practices may have been followed in the ancient world also, resulting in only one individual in the sample suffering the impact of prolonged immersion in cold water.

An analysis of skeletons excavated from four separate necropoleis in the suburbium of Rome also leads to some interesting hypotheses. Here a team of researchers looked for markers of biomechanical stress on a sample of 874 skeletons dated between the first and the third centuries a.d., highlighting the distinct markers found on skeletons from different locations and linking these to local working practices. The skeletons from Casal Bertone, for example, showed stress markers that could be congruent with work in a nearby fullery, while those from Castel Malnome showed damage that could potentially indicate work on the neighbouring salt beds. The final substantial chapter in this section presents a very useful and thorough overview of ancient craftworking and associated pathologies, caused primarily by three factors: the postures of craftsmen at work; the movements associated with their tasks; and the possible pollutions to which they were exposed. The ways in which these factors could manifest themselves in the skeletal material are carefully explained, while in the second part (here labelled as 3, although there is no 2), the need for methodological caution is also stressed, since some of these markers could be consistent with other more domestic activities.

There are two other sections in the volume, one on work and medicine, and one on the body and social status. The former includes an examination of the links between sport and work in Galen, and an analysis of the sources relating to bodies deformed by work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter comprises three chapters focusing in turn on depictions of craftsmen and manual workers in Attic vase painting of the Archaic and Classical period, on health inequalities in the classical city as evidenced by the skeletal material from two cemeteries in Athens (the Kerameikos and the Plateia Kotzia) during the Classical, Hellenistic and Imperial Roman periods, and on the place of people with disabilities in past societies.

It is often difficult to locate people from lower socio-economic strata in the archaeological record and this volume points to the exciting possibilities offered by osteo-archaeology in illuminating the lives of the workers who formed the majority of Graeco-Roman urban populations, while at the same time stressing the methodological caution necessary in interpreting much of this data. Unfortunately, the book is marred by numerous problems with proofreading which detract from the overall quality of the work. While it is very helpful to provide brief English abstracts to accompany the chapters, these require further work, and in some chapters, there are sentences that are incomplete or simply do not make sense (e.g. pp. 99, 107, 163), and numerous spelling errors (e.g. p. 163, isnalnd for island, hinderlsnd for hinterland, p. 165, ctarfmanship for craftsmanship). Overall, however, the vision of the editor is to be commended, and it is hoped that this volume will stimulate further collaborative projects in this area.