A Southwestern Producer Essential Amino Acid d13C Library: Potential Archaelogical Applications

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Interdisciplinary Isotopic Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Well-defined patterns in essential amino acid (AAESS) d13C values of autotrophs (plants and protists) and heterotrophs (bacteria and fungi) that can synthesize AAESS de novo provide enhanced discriminatory power to trace energy flow through freshwater and adjacent terrestrial foodwebs. This method may be useful for studying the impacts of (pre)historic human activities on aridland rivers like the Middle Rio Grande (MRG) in New Mexico, USA. However, no study has generated a library of producer AAESS d13C patterns in either freshwater or terrestrial ecosystems at the landscape scale. We generated AAESS d13C patterns for 15 producer taxa, including instream algae and riparian trees from the MRG and C3 forbs/shrubs, C4 grasses, and CAM plants from the northern Chihuahuan Desert, New Mexico (n = 120). This AAESS d13C library will be invaluable for characterizing the nature and timing of key ecological shifts throughout the millennial-scale history of human occupation along the MRG. Pilot AAESS d13C data show that a diverse fish assemblage recovered from prehispanic Ancestral Pueblo sites in the MRG derived a substantial portion of their AAESS from C4 plants, which suggests that terrestrial energy inputs into riverine food webs was higher in the prehistoric MRG relative to today.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advances in Interdisciplinary Isotopic Research   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26037