Reconstructing Diet from Combined Pollen, Macrofossil, and DNA Analysis of Human Paleofeces

Summary

This work integrates multi-proxy data from 44 human paleofeces in order to study resource use among early farmers in the northern Southwest. Macrofossils and pollen were analyzed for all specimens. Since not all foods leave pollen or macrofossils identifiable after digestion, available resources unlikely to be visually identified were targeted for PCR-analysis in 20 samples using mitochondrial and chloroplast DNA primers. Separate cluster analyses of each of these datasets showed almost no discernable, cross-cutting patterns. Considering these datasets together rather than separately provides a broader view of the diet. However, the fact that they are measured by different metrics and do not necessarily represent the same time period thwarted statistical integration of the results. Pollen and DNA pass through the digestive tract intermittently and over a longer period than macroscopically visible food remains. Furthermore, the pollen or DNA present may be derived from multiple meals. As such, it was determined that the datasets were best examined separately and integrated through qualitative interpretation of the aggregate results rather than direct statistical comparison of separate lines of data from individual samples or groups of samples. While these conclusions may not be universally applicable, these results have implications for future multi-proxy paleofecal studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21122