Small Mammal Isotopes as Proxies for Climate over the Holocene Period on the Eastern Snake River Plain, Idaho

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Reconstructing the prehistoric environment is vital to our understanding of past human use and occupation of a landscape. While many reconstructions, typically based on chemical and biological signatures found in sediment and ice cores, are available, we currently lack suitable records for Idaho’s eastern Snake River Plain. This is mainly due to the scarcity of suitable sedimentary archives in this region. To overcome this problem, we explore the utility of stable-isotope-ratio analysis of small mammal bone from cave sites as a proxy for climate and vegetation change. We present C, N, H, and O isotopic data from bone collagen and C and O from bone apatite from two sites representing the last 10,000 years. The results highlight the potential for small mammal isotopes in evaluating environmental change, providing support for additional research into this arena.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26262