From Present-Day Fields to Ancient Samples…and Back Again: Strategies for Establishing Principles of Interpretation in Plant Stable Isotope Work

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Plant stable isotope analysis presents a series of ‘middle range’ challenges for archaeologists, but also unique opportunities for reconstructing ancient agroecologies. Here we focus on the potential and limitations of modern crop studies for informing interpretation of archaeobotanical cereal and pulse d13C and d15N values as evidence of crop growing conditions. From experience gained in modern crop and weed surveys in Europe, Western Asia and North Africa, we consider several issues, such as the complementarity of experimental and ‘traditional’ farming studies, integration with other ecological indicators such as weed functional traits and the challenges of comparing modern and ancient crop varieties. We also suggest how a growing body of archaeobotanical stable isotope data can shed light on some uniformitarian dilemmas, as well as prompting new questions. Interpretation of ancient values appears most robust when supported by distinct lines of evidence subject to different sources of error and ambiguity, and with emphasis on exclusion of unlikely scenarios.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Challenges and Future Directions in Plant Stable Isotope Analysis in Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25449