Are Dogs Suitable Proxies for Humans in Archaeological Isotopic Dietary Assessments? Bayesian Analyses of Bone Collagen Stable Isotope Ratios from Ancestral Iroquoian Sites

Abstract

Under the archaeological canine surrogacy approach (CSA) it is assumed that because dogs were reliant on humans for food, they had similar diets to the people with whom they lived. As a result, the stable isotopes of their tissues (bone collagen and apatite, tooth enamel and dentine collagen) will be close to the humans with whom they cohabited. Therefore, in the absence of human tissue, dog tissue isotopes can be used to reconstruct past human diets. Here d13C and d15N ratios on previously published dog and human bone collagen from fourteenth-seventeenth century AD ancestral Iroquoian village archaeological sites and ossuaries in southern Ontario are used with MixSIAR, a Bayesian dietary mixing model, to determine if dog stable isotope ratios are good proxies for human diets. The modeling results indicate that human and dogs had different diets. Human dietary protein came primarily from maize and high trophic level fish and dogs from maize, terrestrial animals, low trophic level fish, and human feces. This indicates that CSA is likely not a valid approach for the reconstruction of ancestral Iroquoian diets.

Pets or functional animals: dogs and cats in medieval and early modern Estonia

“…However, some authors have cautioned against using dogs as direct analogues to humans, since dogs have distinct dietary habits (such as regular consumption of faeces), which may affect their stable isotope values (e.g. Guiry 2012;Hart 2023). Pets or functional animals: dogs and cats When comparing the isotopic values of dogs from coastal Estonia to those from inland Estonia, a statistically significant difference was found in the δ 13 C values (p < 0.01), while no significant difference was observed in the δ 15 N values.…”

Resetting Archaeological Interpretations of Precontact Indigenous Agriculture: Maize Isotopic Evidence from Three Ancestral Mohawk Iroquoian Villages

“…IRMS measurements were obtained on six American plum (Prunus americana) and six chokecherry (P. virginiana) endocarps from Garoga and Smith-Pagerie, respectively, as a second means of determining the range of δ 15 N ratios of uncultivated plants (Hart and Winchell-Sweeney 2023). P. americana grows in a wide range of habitats from floodplains to upland forests in New York, whereas P. virginiana grows in hardwood forests and forest edges (Weldy et al 2023).…”

“…Data Availability Statement. All data used in the analyses are available in Hart and Winchell-Sweeney (2023) on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7946328.…”