Stable Isotopes (Other Keyword)
1-25 (138 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaic people and Classic Period Maya played important roles in shaping their environments. Through early deforestation and later agricultural erosion humans have modified the world they lived in. This study aims to show the role the Maya had in the environmental change in their region. We report results of analysis of a 5,500-year-long profiles soil from...
Adaptive Dietary Response to Long-Term Drought: Diachronic Stable Isotope Evidence from the Central Sierra Nevada, California (2017)
This study examines human dietary responses to the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA), an extended period of warmer and drier environmental conditions from AD 900-1300, in the Central Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Stable isotope and radiocarbon analyses of human remains attributable to the Tuolumne Me-Wuk reveal individual-level dietary behaviors. Results show a region-specific "Central Sierran" pattern of resource use in the form of a distinctive isotopic signature relative to other areas...
Addressing Structural Violence Through the Untold Life Histories of Marginalized Individuals Buried in San Francisco’s City Cemetery (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Life and Death in the San Francisco Bay: Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to Historic Lifeways", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Construction activity at the Legion of Honor Museum in the 1990s uncovered more than 900 burials from the former City Cemetery in northwest San Francisco. Bones from human burials that exhibited pathological conditions were accessioned at the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical...
Agouti commensalism? An open question in the prehistoric Lesser Antilles, West Indies (2017)
Light isotope data for bone collagen, bone apatite, and tooth enamel apatite have been collected for prehistoric agouti (Dasyprocta sp.) recovered from secure archaeological contexts on Carriacou (Sabazan and Grand Bay) and Nevis (Coconut Walk) in the Lesser Antilles, West Indies. Stable carbon isotope ratios of individual specimens exhibit a wide range of values for both bone collagen (-20.0‰ to -11.5‰; avg = -17.8‰) and bone apatite (-13.6 to -6.5‰), with apatite-collagen spacing also quite...
An analysis of the Jamestown diet (2017)
Our current knowledge of the historic fort of Jamestown in Virginia has developed through interpretation of the archaeological record and historical documents. The success of all colonies in the New World depended on the integral ability to produce food. Prior to developing a stable food source, the colonists at Jamestown relied heavily on those provisions they brought with them from England. We can learn about these provisions from ship manifests, colonists’ diaries, and inventory lists....
Ancient Origins of Ethnographic Shell Bead Money in Central California (2017)
Far from providing a bounty that obviated agriculture, the California acorn economy presented risks of secular variation more extreme than experienced by other densely populated hunter gatherers. Decentralized political organization and high ethno-linguistic diversity further complicated redistribution of spatio-temporally variant resources. In the ethnographic period, shell bead money played a key role in enabling exchange. We examine changing patterns in bead manufacture and distribution...
Animal diaspora and culture change (2015)
Animal introductions are frequently equated with the introduction of new dietary ingredients; however, this paper will argue that access to 'meat' is seldom the motivation for the importation of exotic species. By examining a number of case-studies pertaining to Britain it will be proposed that many faunal introductions were both inspired by, and resulted in, social, economic and ideological change. Many species were associated with specific deities and because they were imported from beyond the...
Applications of Rat Bone Collagen Stable Isotope Analysis towards Investigating Long-term Island Socio-ecosystem Dynamics: Case studies from Mangareva (French Polynesia) and Pemba Island (Zanzibar) (2017)
Stable isotope analysis of small commensal fauna provides a novel approach to paleoecological reconstruction and investigations of human site activities. The human translocation of rat species, especially the black rat (Rattus rattus), brown rat (R. norvegicus), and Pacific rat (R. exulans), has significantly—and often deleteriously—impacted native floral and faunal communities, particularly within island ecosystems. Rats are small-bodied omnivores with limited home ranges and highly generalized...
Assessing Dietary Variability at Gillman Mound, South Australia using Stable Carbon and Nitrogen Isotopes (2015)
The production, distribution, and consumption of food are central to the human experience. What we eat and how we prepare, consume, and share our victuals permeates every society, past and present. Therefore, it is crucial that our study of past human societies include attention to the role of foods and diet in our observations and interpretations of archaeological and biological data. Recent research in South Australia has highlighted the need for further exploration into the social structure...
Assessment of past subsistence strategy and environmental impacts using novel geochemical analyses of mollusk shells (2016)
Archaeologists are beginning to apply two new analytical techniques to estuarine mollusk shells: inferring paleo-salinity from sclerochronological oxygen isotope profiles and assessing anthropogenic waste loading from mollusk nitrogen isotope measurements. These related approaches may offer insight into subsistence priorities and environmental alteration, but data from each should be interpreted with caution until these proxies are more completely validated. Potential uses and limitations of...
Bioarchaeological evidence for diet in a Latte Period assemblage from Saipan, CNMI (2017)
Garapan, a Latte Period (A.D. 1000-1521) archaeological site in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, was excavated under mitigation efforts by Scientific Consultant Services, Hawaii in 2015. The recovery produced over 400 sets of skeletal remains, of which forty-eight were submitted for dietary bioarchaeological analysis in the Center for Archaeology, Materials and Applied Spectroscopy. This research focuses on the importance of marine versus terrestrial protein sources and introduced plant...
Bioarchaeological Research at Castillo de Huarmey, Peru (2017)
The Wari imperial mausoleum, discovered in 2012-13 at the site of Castillo de Huarmey, Peru brought to light remains of 64 individuals buried within the main chamber underneath and additional seven in the contexts directly associated with the mausoleum. The upper layers of the building also yielded a collection of human and animal remains. The collection of human remains brings a unique set of data for bioarchaeologists. The research performed so far include standard analyses like taphonomy,...
Bioarcheology of the North Central United States (1997)
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The 'Bitter' Death of Children: Health, Welfare and the Funerary Treatment of Infants and Young Children in Christian Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Health and Welfare of Children in the Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss the burials of infants and young children in the earliest Christian cemeteries in Anglo-Saxon England (10th and 11th centuries CE). While in earlier pagan periods the burials of the very youngest members of communities are conspicuous by their paucity, the earliest Christian cemeteries have a much more representative...
Bone Carbonate Derived Stable Isotope Data and Aleut Diet Change (2015)
In this poster, we build on an earlier study by using stable isotope data extracted from bone carbonate to evaluate the hypothesis that two behaviorally distinct groups of people, Paleo- and Neo-Aleut, occupied the eastern Aleutians after 1000 BP. This study focuses on directly dated burial assemblages from Chaluka midden, Ship Rock Island and Kagamil Island. We use the SISUS linear mixing model informed by isotopic data from Aleut faunal assemblages to address temporal and spatial variation in...
Breastfeeding, weaning and childhood diet in cave and megalithic populations of Late Neolithic north-central Spain (2017)
Stable carbon and nitrogen data of adult/adolescent human bone collagen from north-central Spanish Late Neolithic (ca. 3500-2900 cal. BC) provide evidence for the existence of significant isotopic differences among and between communities living in close proximity and burying their dead in caves and megalithic graves. This, together with previously identified distinct funerary selection patterns, suggests an unsuspected complex social or cultural differentiation. The purpose of this paper is to...
The Bridge River Dogs: A Comprehensive interpretation of aDNA and stable isotopes analysis obtained from dog remains (2016)
Excavations at the Bridge River site have been on-going since 2003, increasing our understanding of the communities that inhabited the Middle Fraser Canyon, British Columbia, over 1,000 years ago. The most recent excavation at Housepit 54 in the summer of 2014 supplied further data regarding relationships between people and their dogs. Dogs are well documented in the Middle Fraser Canyon through both archaeological excavations and traditional knowledge. A household's possession of a dog has been...
The Calamitous Fourteenth Century and Its Influence on the People: A Case Study from Ypres, Belgium (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Integrating Isotope Analyses: The State of Play and Future Directions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the fourteenth century in Europe, challenges like climate change, crop failures, and the plague affected the people significantly. Such events bore great consequences for people’s health and their everyday lives forcing them to adapt. The inhabitants of Ypres, present-day Belgium, were no exception. During the...
The Canids of Arroyo Hondo: a reanalysis (2017)
Domestic dogs were an important part of human cultures in the prehistoric American Southwest; the significance of these animals is apparent from ceramic decorations and clay figurines, as well as faunal remains. But how these animals functioned within Southwestern cultures is less well-understood. Prehistoric dogs’ roles in some cases seem to have been similar to those of modern dogs: protector, worker, and pet. However, zooarchaeological data have shown that dogs, like turkeys, were also used...
Changing Diets: Using Stable Isotopic Micro-sampling Approaches to Explore Dietary Changes throughout Life (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Isotope analysis of bulk carbon and nitrogen from tooth dentine and bone collagen are now commonly used in studies of dietary reconstruction from past populations. Teeth do not remodel once formed, so bulk dentine values provide an “average” dietary signal from the few years of childhood when the tooth was formed. Bones, on the other hand, continue to...
Childhood Diet and Foraging in Prehistoric Central California (2015)
Ethnographic evidence demonstrates that hunter-gatherer children may forage effectively, where ecology, subsistence strategies, and social organization are conducive to juvenile participation. We hypothesize that, in easily navigated environments with food items accessible to children, juveniles will engage in assistive or independent foraging after a period of exclusive post-weaning parental provisioning, and that differences in male and female diets will reflect the sexual division of labor...
A Common Analytical Language: Compound-Specific Isotope Analysis as a Means for Collaboration between Archaeology and Ecology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Interdisciplinary Isotopic Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists first embraced stable isotope analysis decades ago and have used this tool to study many aspects of human ecology, including diet, movement patterns, and the domestication of plants and animals (to name a few). In comparison to bulk tissue isotope analysis, technological advances in the analysis of individual compounds such...
Comparing Short-Term Dietary Variability throughout Early Life between Trophy and Non-Trophy Head Individuals from Uraca, Arequipa, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paleodietary analysis of incrementally forming δ13C and δ15N can show which points during early life growth and development individual diets converged and diverged from other individuals within a burial community. Understanding how those changes correspond with estimated age and sex and other key aspects of social identify or lived experience can shed...
Considering Robustness and Vulnerability in Texas Hunter-Gatherer Social-Ecological Systems using Stable Isotope Data (2015)
We analyze stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic data from over 200 foragers from inland, riverine, and coastal settings on the Texas Coastal Plain. Prehistoric foragers on the Texas Coastal Plain faced the challenge of maintaining a robust supply of food despite constant changes in their environments, including seasonal changes and changes that occurred over decades-to-centuries, like climate change and sea level rise. Given that coastal estuaries and inland river valleys had resources that...
Crops, Gender, and Food Choices: Investigating the Formation of Chinese Staple Cuisines via Stable Isotope Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The modern Chinese food system was formed over thousands of years from a diverse set of regional agricultures and cuisines. Isotopic analysis of archaeological skeletons can be used to investigate the importance of different food resources to past diets. This approach has been extensively...