tuco wrote:There was diversity .. is 1 red cube among 999 999 blue cubes diversity? If not, how many red cubes among 999 999 blue cubes there have to be for the set to be diverse?

...Roman Britain was largely built by Britons, not incomers, of whom there were relatively few. Most of the incomers were soldiers, of a huge variety of ethnic backgrounds – not many were Italians. There was very little settlement by immigrant civilians, except for the presence of the army and fairly small concentrations of incomers, mostly at centres like London and Bath. Modern estimates suggest that incomers were outnumbered by native Britons by at least twenty to one – but of course this minority was a politically, militarily and culturally dominant ruling elite. The result of the interaction of the two groups was an interesting cultural hybrid, not simply Britons adopting Roman ways, but a story of adaptation and the development of a distinctive Romano-British culture.

tuco wrote:According to your definition, North Korea is ethnically diverse despite probability of drawing two random individuals from population not to be of the same ethnic group is 0,002.

tuco wrote:... when society is not ethnically diverse? Number. ...

tuco wrote:So I ask, you, again.

tuco wrote:... when society is not ethnically diverse? Number. ...

zoon wrote:Googling the question, an article on the British Museum website here says that about one in twenty people in Roman Britain were incomers, although the proportion in the cities may have been higher, and the incomers did come from around the Roman Empire, they were not only Italians. Quoting from the article:

...Roman Britain was largely built by Britons, not incomers, of whom there were relatively few. Most of the incomers were soldiers, of a huge variety of ethnic backgrounds – not many were Italians. There was very little settlement by immigrant civilians, except for the presence of the army and fairly small concentrations of incomers, mostly at centres like London and Bath. Modern estimates suggest that incomers were outnumbered by native Britons by at least twenty to one – but of course this minority was a politically, militarily and culturally dominant ruling elite. The result of the interaction of the two groups was an interesting cultural hybrid, not simply Britons adopting Roman ways, but a story of adaptation and the development of a distinctive Romano-British culture.

Tracer Tong wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

Tracer Tong wrote:

tuco wrote:Is Britain ethnically diverse today?

I'm not sure, really, and there are stark differences depending on where you're talking about the in the country. But my expectation would be that the Britain of today is much more ethnically diverse than it was a couple of millennia ago.

Surely everywhere is, on average, more diverse today due to vast expansion of transport and communications, but hardly seems relevant. There was diversity in Roman Britain so I see no problem with representing that in an educational video. It would be a misrepresentation to portray any narrow ethnicity.

Of course there was 'diversity'. The question is the extent of this, which bears on whether certain portrayals are misleading or otherwise.

zoon wrote:
Edited to add: The caption does say the family is typical, which I would question, it's like saying that the family of a senior British officer in colonial India was typical of Indian families at the time.

purplerat wrote:

zoon wrote:
Edited to add: The caption does say the family is typical, which I would question, it's like saying that the family of a senior British officer in colonial India was typical of Indian families at the time.

I would venture to guess that when the term "typical family" is used that it's probably being used generally and not meant to imply that every detail of the family is typical. Otherwise, the term is utterly meaningless as I'd be shocked if you could ever find any family which doesn't have some minute detail which is atypical. It's just that some people get more hung up on a detail like skin color than say somebody being of an unusually shorter or taller height than what's typical.

VazScep wrote:I struggle to get worked up regardless. I'm gonna guess that people from that period were also short, had pox scars, and really fucked up teeth, but I'm not going to care if they depict them in a fashion that fits more modern ideals, and those ideals I'd say cover a diversity of skin colours.

VazScep wrote:For another example, there's a hangout where these twats are talking about political correctness gone mad, complaining about the historical inaccuracy of black people in Beauty and the Beast.

These folk are just twats, and it's funny to point at them and tell them they're twats.

Emperor Septimius Severus was not the only Roman of African origin in Britain. There were other African officers, soldiers and slaves here in the 3rd century. Excavations at York between 1951 and 1959 uncovered the largest number of human skeletons from Roman Britain ever exhumed. Archaeologists suggest that several of these people could have been of African origin.

There were three Roman legions in Britain for most of the period, each consisting of 6,000 men. The legions were made up of different ethnic groups from Spain, Africa, Italy and Germany. The historian Anthony Birley notes that a Glossary - opens new windowNumerus Maurorum was stationed at Burgh-by-Sands near Carlisle. The soldiers of this unit would have been among those who rebuilt and stood guard on Hadrian's Wall in the 3rd century.

There is an on-going debate regarding the presence or otherwise of black people in Britain in antiquity. The basic problem with this kind of research has always been the reliability and availability of source materials and the analytical methods by which we study them.

The most celebrated example of black Romans in Britain, is the case of the Roman military garrison at the fort of Burgh-by-Sands, on Hadrian’s wall in Cumbria. A fourth century inscription tells us that the Roman auxiliary unit Numerus Maurorum Aurelianorum was stationed at Aballava, modern day Burgh-by-Sands. This unit had been mustered in the Roman province of Mauretania in North Africa, modern Morocco.