Changing Diets: Using Stable Isotopic Micro-sampling Approaches to Explore Dietary Changes throughout Life

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Isotope analysis of bulk carbon and nitrogen from tooth dentine and bone collagen are now commonly used in studies of dietary reconstruction from past populations. Teeth do not remodel once formed, so bulk dentine values provide an “average” dietary signal from the few years of childhood when the tooth was formed. Bones, on the other hand, continue to remodel throughout life. Therefore, a bulk bone collagen signal might represent decades or even a lifetime average. The research presented here is focused on refining micro-sampling techniques in both teeth and bone to allow for greater temporal resolution in dietary isotope analysis. Initial results from modern and archaeological human teeth and modern animal bones with known grazing histories suggest that these high-resolution methods can detect changes in dietary input that are masked by more traditional sampling approaches. Our sampling approach to teeth detected peaks in the incremental dentine isotope profiles suggestive of nutritional stress and seasonal dietary shifts. Our histologically informed micro-sampling method of animal bones showed site specific differences in isotope values and also provided the ability to detect shifts in husbandry practices/location during the lifespan of the animal.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37229.0