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As you say you are writing a paper, I'll assume you have access to JSTOR. Take a look at this paper: David M. Jacobson Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research No. 313 (Feb., 1999), pp. 65-74 Published by: The American Schools of Oriental Research Here's the abstract "This article critically reexamines the origin of the name Palestine. The earliest occurrence of this name in a Greek text is in the mid-fifth century B. C., Histories of Herodotus, where it is applied to the area of the Levant between Phoenicia and Egypt. Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century A. D., explicitly links this name to the land of the Philistines and modern consensus agrees with him. Yet, some 300 years earlier, the translators of the Greek Septuagint version of the Pentateuch chose Philistieim rather than Palaistinoi to describe the Philistines. In the earliest Classical literature references to Palestine generally applied to the Land of Israel in the wider sense. A reappraisal of this question has given rise to the proposition that the name Palestine, in its Greek form Palaistinē, was both a transliteration of a word used to describe the land of the Philistines and, at the same time, a literal translation of the name Israel." We know Syria Palestina was a province after the time of Hadrian, and have coins with that name from the time of Aurelius. We also know that Hadrian was very vindictive to the Jews (there's a bas-relief somewhere of him killing one personally) so I think most historians draw the obvious conclusion. However if nothing but the original sources will do, you might also try Eusebius bk 6 there might be something there.

I'll tell you as I'll be at the villa on the 23rd

It's actually possible to date age at death pretty accurately. It has to do when certain bone structures are complete and when they start to decalcify. Think wisdom teeth for a very crude idea. Apart from that, we need a link to the original article (I couldn't find it online). Firstly that should tell us some of the missing vital information such as the sample size, dating techniques and grave locations. Crucially, did the Roman era bones show significantly higher malnutrition? If the 'pay lower taxes, eat better' thesis has any merit they should. And the story should have reported this rather essential fact. Of course, those villagers slaughtered by raiders were probably not buried neatly enough for their remains to be discovered later, nor those on the side that came second in a battle. So just as long-lived villa owners skewed the statistics in Roman times, those who lived long enough to die peacefully might skew the stats in the post-Roman era. More probably, given the size of any feasible sample set, two years is well within the margin of stastical error.

I have a minor problem with these types of announcements (they seem to be popular just now). Do they reflect current political or academic agendas? (whatever they may be? - I hesitate to even speculate on the current politics in Catholic Universities in the Northeastern US). How can they have statistically significant data on diet or life expectancy in the 4th or 5th century? how many graves? How do they date them? how do they know how old the people were or what they ate? Can the Britons really have had a longer life expectancy and higher standard of living when being ruled by dozens of petty warlords engaged in endemic warfare? Do people normally live longer in rural environments without urban centers? How do they know what tax rates were under the Romans and Saxons, did Saxons even collect taxes or just steal whatever they wanted? If things were so swell under the Germanic invaders why did the Welsh and Cornish resist and the Bretons emigrate? In the 60's and 70s there was a revisionist trend that claimed that the Germanic invaders were not such bad guys (proto-hippies?) relative to the authoritarian Romans (the "establishment"), Is this a resurgence?