<html>Individuals from Isotopes: Can Stable Isotopes Distinguish the Remains of Different Cooper’s Hawks (<i>Accipiter cooperii</i>)?</html>

Author(s): Jonathan Dombrosky

Year: 2025

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Biomolecular Approaches to Human-Animal Interactions Past and Present" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

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Zooarchaeologists frequently try to calculate or isolate individual animals from assemblages that are highly fragmented and commingled, which often presents serious methodological hurdles. Biomolecular approaches can vastly improve the ability to identify individual animals from archaeological contexts but some, such as aDNA analysis, are cost prohibitive. Stable isotope analysis is a cost-effective biomolecular tool commonly used in zooarchaeological research that can identify individuals in the past through comparison of isotopic variation within and between individual animals. We test the reliability of this approach using a collection of modern Cooper’s Hawks (Accipiter cooperii). We provide paired carbon (δ<sup>13</sup>C), nitrogen (δ<sup>15</sup>N), and hydrogen (δ<sup>2</sup>H) isotope values of bone collagen, muscle, and liver from the same 10 skeletal elements across 20 individuals. We explore this dataset from a few different angles: providing basic descriptive statistics, calculating the amount of overlapping isotopic space across individuals, and estimating individual animal prediction accuracy with machine learning models. We find that there is large within-individual variation, a high degree of overlap, and that prediction accuracy is low. Our results suggest that identifying individuals from isotopes is difficult at best, but focusing on bones that grow similarly and using multiple isotope systems can help improve accuracy.

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Cite this Record

Individuals from Isotopes: Can Stable Isotopes Distinguish the Remains of Different Cooper’s Hawks (Accipiter cooperii)?. Jonathan Dombrosky. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 509631)

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Keywords

General
ancient DNA • Worldwide • Zooarchaeology

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50783