A stable relationship: isotopes and bioarchaeology are in it for the long haul

Abstract

Given their ubiquity in dietary reconstruction, it is fitting that the story of isotopes began with a conversation over dinner. Although coined in scientific literature by Frederick Soddy (1913), the word ‘isotope’ was first conceived by Margaret Todd, a medical doctor (also known as the novelist ‘Graham Travers’, and an all-round gender-stereotype-smasher of their age). In 1912, Soddy and Todd were attending a supper in Glasgow. When talk turned to work, Soddy described the then nameless concept of elements of different masses that occupy the same place in the periodic table. Todd suggested the term ‘isotope’, from the Greekisos(‘same’) +topos(‘place’), and the name stuck (Nicol 1957; Nagel 1982).

4000 years of human dietary evolution in central Germany, from the first farmers to the first elites

“…Besides behavioural choices as to what food to consume, numerous other nutritional and gender-specific factors must certainly be taken into account when assessing the subsistence and nutritional balance of individuals. In the future, analysis of single amino acids of nitrogen and the compound-specific carbon isotope analysis of lipids and bone mineral may help providing more detailed and nuanced insight on aspects of human diet, such as protein sources in complex foodwebs, nutritional stress and disease [ 129 – 131 ]. They should become a standard in isotope studies and applied more often and routinely.…”

Dentin isotopic reconstruction of individual life histories reveals millet consumption during weaning and childhood at the Late Neolithic (4500 bp) Gaoshan site in southwestern China

“…As for nitrogen, there is a stepwise 15 N enrichment along the food chain, with a 3–5‰ increase with each trophic level (Bocherens & Drucker, ; DeNiro & Epstein, ). Thus, δ 15 N values are useful to analyse the intake of high trophic level foods, such as terrestrial, freshwater, and marine resources (Britton, ; Schoeninger, DeNiro, & Tauber, ).…”

“…Over the last 40 years, carbon (δ 13 C) and nitrogen (δ 15 N) stable isotope ratio analysis of bulk collagen from human and animal bones has become a routine method to investigate a wide range of archaeological questions relevant to diet, evolution, mobility, social hierarchy, breastfeeding and weaning patterns, disease, nutritional stress, agriculture, and animal domestication (e.g., Britton, ; Lee‐Thorp, ; Reitsema, ; Schoeninger, ; Tsutaya & Yoneda, ). However, it has only been relatively recently that sampling methodologies have advanced to examine individual specific biographies in detail using stable isotope ratio analysis (Beaumont & Montgomery, ; Eerkens, Berget, & Bartelink, ; Fuller, Richards, & Mays, ; Laffoon, Espersen, & Mickleburgh, ; Lamb, Evans, Buckley, & Appleby, ; Montgomery et al, ).…”

Oxygen isotopes in bioarchaeology: Principles and applications, challenges and opportunities

“…Such work is likely to grow in prominence in the coming years and some attempts at establishing data repositories for specific regions are currently underway (e.g. IsoArcH, Salesse et al, 2017), although isotope bioarchaeology (along with other fields of isotope science) has yet to benefit from a single standardised, user-populated repository akin to GenBank (Britton, 2017;Pauli et al, 2017Pauli et al, , 2015. Alongside the more routine use of larger and larger data sets facilitated through better mechanisms of data archiving and sharing, we are also likely to see an increasing uptake and refinement of modelling approaches that enable interpretation and analysis of isotope values in more formalised frameworks that better incorporate the mechanistic and empirical insights into isotopic systems that are continuously developing.…”

“…This approach is particularly relevant for targeting vertical movement patterns and has been used to identify vertical movements of mouflon during the Late Glacial Maximum in the Caucasus region (Tornero et al, 2016) and for caprine herds from the Chalcolithic period in central Anatolia . It should be noted that over-winter foddering may obscure this relationship through the creation of a negative association between δ 13 C and δ 18 O (Chase et al, 2014;Dufour et al, 2014;Makarewicz and Pederzani, 2017), although the co-analysis of wild fauna may go some way to discerning foddering and vertical transhumance in domesticates in certain regions (Makarewicz, 2017 (Britton, 2017). As with other areas of isotope bioarchaeology, however, modern data sets from individuals of known behaviours have proven (and will remain) paramount in the reconstruction of seasonal mobility patterns.…”