The Effect of Sex on Diet: Isotopic Variation among North and South American Foragers

Summary

This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The extent to which subsistence labor was divided among archaeological forager populations of the Americas is currently debated. This analysis uses bone isotope chemistry and Bayesian mixing models to examine trophic variation between female and male individuals from North and South American forager populations. We observe that on average male individuals tend to occupy higher trophic levels than females, suggesting differences in subsistence labor. However, we further observe that average meat/plant contributions differed little with considerable overlap in female and male dietary values. The data suggest that sex exerted little effect on diet and, ostensibly, division of subsistence labor among forager populations of the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38458.0