Bite into This: Interproximal Wear Facets in Middle-Holocene Hunter-Gatherers

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this dental anthropology project, the use of interproximal wear facets of teeth will be measured and studied to assess changes in facet size between Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Early Bronze Age hunter-fisher-gatherer populations. These populations hail from the Latvian Stone Age site of Zvejnieki, and from numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age sites across the Cis-Baikal region of Siberia, Russia. I will present the associations (or lack thereof) between facet size and diet, looking to see if there is a change in facet size with the introduction of pottery in the Neolithic, or whether different diets (i.e., fish vs. game) can be elucidated from them. For the Cis-Baikal, any associations found can be supported by extant dietary stable isotope data. Previous studies have suggested that interproximal wear facets show differences in diets among populations, and if this holds true, the samples above will provide evidence of 4,000 years of dietary prehistory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35894.0