Isotopic Studies of Foragers Diet: Environmental Archaeological Approaches

R. BARBERENA

Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Springer

Lugar: New York; Año: 2014; p. 4111 - 4120

The introduction of stable isotopes in archaeological research began in the 1970s, and produced a revolution in the ways that several key issues are studied, including early hominin diets, subsistence and spatial organization of forager societies, individual life histories, among others. Isotopic analysis of bones, teeth and other organic tissues is a tool for the quantitative reconstruction of past human diets, providing an archaeological measure of subsistence that complements studies in zooarchaeology and archaeobotany. Isotopic research is based on the premise that you are what you eat, in other words, that the isotopic composition of an organism?s tissues is a function of the composition of its diet. Nevertheless, isotopic values do not have direct dietary meaning, and need to be analyzed in an environmental context. The isotopic values for the vegetal and animal foods potentially available for forager populations in a given environment, known as the isotopic ecology, provide the context for the interpretation of past foragers diets.