First d13C values for human skeletal remains from south western puna (Jujuy, Argentina)

KILLIAN GALVÁN, VIOLETA ANAHÍ; OLIVERA, DANIEL E.

San Carlos de Bariloche

Simposio; VI South American Symposium on Isotope Geology; 2008

Instituto de Geocronología y Geología Isotópica (CONICET-UBA)

The agicultural and pastoral develompment in the basins of Argentinian North Eastern Puna societies of the Late Period (900 to 550 AP) has been a subject of reserch for archeology from decades (Alfaro de Lanzone 1988). Even though, we don`t know what the respective impact of those activities was on people`s diet as regards the biological and social standards. As a result we lack an explanation of the role that the produced goods played in the organization and persistence of these populations. Therefore, we aim to study the management of resourse from a consumption approach by monitoring the habitual proportion of the ingested food through analysis of human stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios. Doing this, we will obtain an independent tool to infer the nature of the agricultural and pastoral explotion in the past.In this paper we present the first results d3C on human skeletal bone collagen from Río DoncellasArchaeological Town (Jujuy). We worked on individuals who belong to a museum collection placed in the Argentina`s Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano and obteined from excavations done in the seventies. Up to now we got the values of 9 of them. All conected to a cronological period of 250 years approximately. The data shows a paleodiet where predominates the consumption of plants with a photosintetic pattern C3 and C3 feeders.