Meat and Potatoes: A Mixed 7,000-Year-Old-Diet

Summary

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

This presentation examines the diets of 16 prehistoric burials at Soro Mik’aya Patxja, a high-elevation Archaic Period site occupied 7,000 years ago in the Peruvian Andes. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes were analyzed to infer the prehistoric hunter-gatherer diets during a period that preceded the domestication of tubers, quinoa, and vicuña. Plants such as tubers played a more important role than originally thought in ancient hunter-gatherer diets. Vicuña were also an equally important and abundant food source as well. Analysis of prehistoric diets can give insight to the domestication of these important meat and plant resources. The results confirm previous studies, which have suggested a mixed diet of C3 plants and camelids.

Cite this Record

Meat and Potatoes: A Mixed 7,000-Year-Old-Diet. Jennifer Chen, Randy Haas, Jelmer Eerkens, Bryna Hull. Presented at The 84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Albuquerque, NM. 2019 ( tDAR id: 450163)

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

Spatial Coverage

min long: -82.441; min lat: -56.17 ; max long: -64.863; max lat: 16.636 ;

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23814