Developing Temporally Relevant and Spatially Robust Sulfur (δ34S) Isotope Baselines for Archaeological Studies of Residence and Mobility

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Many of the central questions of archaeology engage directly with themes relating to movement, mobility, and migration. The two most common isotope systems that have been exploited for this purpose are strontium (87Sr/86Sr) and oxygen (δ18O), with sulfur isotopes (δ34S) being a much more recent addition to the isotopic arsenal for investigating residence and mobility. Because the application of sulfur is not limited solely to tooth enamel, by targeting skeletal tissues that represent different periods in an individual’s lifetime, it has the possibility of directly tracing residence, isotopically, an individual throughout a lifetime. The poster presented here demonstrates that in the rush to apply this isotope system to past remains our overall appreciation of the natural variability of δ34S in the environment has not been well characterized, which may be leading researchers to developing archaeological narratives and broad models of δ34S variations across regions that are “importantly wrong.” Furthermore, it presents methods for developing more robust baseline data for interpreting archaeological δ34S values, thusly moving the state-of-the-art forward.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39150.0