This chapter explores the spectacles of gladiators, bare-knuckle boxing, and the early theater. Wild, violent bodies were banned in Rome and America: the gladiator excluded from civic participation and protections; boxing matches banned through much of the nineteenth century. Both bodies were marked by wounds, but even more by a brashness and ruggedness that was contrary to standards of elite decorum. These bodies were the object of elite condemnation as uncivilized, uneducated, and unrefined. And these bodies were the object of the gaze, put on display to perform to the expectations of the audience. The problem is that boundaries of exclusion prove to be permeable. And these boundaries prove to be permeable because the lawless, uncivilized bodies replay the role of violence in constituting a founding identity. The conquest of wild, lawless nature in the name of civilization required a type of body, one that could act with similar violent wildness. To the chagrin of certain elites, the taboo body comes to be valorized, grafted and grafting itself onto the rugged origins embedded in the founding ideal.

Counting dental acellular cementum (AC) annulations is used to estimate age at death in anthropological contexts by embedding the tooth, sectioning the root, and imaging the thin sections. However, there are several published protocols creating confusion to optimize these steps. We compared three standard illumination techniques (differential interference contrast; transmitted bright field; transmitted polarized) on sections with the same thickness, field of view, on three types of samples: fresh teeth embedded in both MMA and epoxy; archeological samples embedded in epoxy. We compared the quality of AC increment visibility on longitudinal and transversal sections of the same root, to optimize the quality of AC micrographs for age estimation. Results suggest that differential interference contrast microscopy might be ideal, even though brightfield consistently provides a decent image; epoxy resin with quick polymerization time doesn't affect AC structure and allows for higher contrast than traditional MMA; transverse sections are more consistent. These results emphasize the need for cementum-specific procedures not always compatible with traditional dental analyses.