International Journal of Osteoarchaeology最新文献

We have reconstructed the feeding patterns, weaning age, dietary structure, and physiological stress experienced by the late Yangshao culture (3500–2800 BCE) of the Middle Yellow River in different individuals early years through comparative carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analyses of dentin incremental sections, limb bones, or rib assemblages. We present dentin incremental and bone collagen δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N isotope data from 17 individuals from two late Yangshao culture archeological sites (Qingtai 青台 and Shuanghuaishu 双槐树). The result showed that all individuals in the sample weaned between 2.5 and 3.8 years old, and other than the fact that females weaned slightly sooner than males in the Qingtai sites, there were no sex variations in dietary trends across life history stages. The majority of individuals consistently consumed C₄ foods (millets) from early childhood onward. A small number of individuals consumed both C₃ and C₄ foods at an early age, and the proportion of C₃ foods (rice) consumed declined or gradually disappeared with increasing age. In addition to the traditional local foods based on millets, a small number of individual families added rice, a newly accessible resource, in varying proportions for young children's foods, which has directly contributed to the dichotomy within this research group in terms of dietary patterns and child-rearing concepts. The emergence of early childhood nurturing strategies in this study serves as a significant microcosm of the social context in which individual families, private ownership, and civilization progressively took shape in early China.

Relatively little attention has been paid to the importance of birds as alternative food sources and as ceremonial offerings in Moche practices. I examine bird remains from the Late Moche (600–900 CE) site of Huaca Colorada of the Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, to investigate the role of birds in daily activities and their use in ritual events. The Moche used birds in diverse ways in both domestic and ceremonial activities. Beginning with their use as food source, this analysis addresses the active hunting and opportunistic collection of various avian taxa to establish some of the ways that these animals formed part of subsistence practices. I further consider the way birds can serve as environmental proxies. I examine the presence of marine birds and possible nonlocal species at Huaca Colorada for their use in ceremonial practice. Zooarchaeological and iconographic evidence attests to various predatory bird taxa as important liminal beings for bridging different ecological zones and as vehicles for the travel of spirits and other supernatural forces between spheres of the living and the dead. By investigating birds in Moche practices, this article contributes new insights on the way avian species formed part of feasting events and mortuary offerings and more fully connects iconographic and zooarchaeological records.

The Vikings are well known for their long-distance travels. Originating in Scandinavia, they took their shallow draft ships along the river networks and open seas to trade with Europe, Russia, Constantinople and the Mediterranean (Morcken, 1989). They also undertook raids and later invasion and settlement of coastal areas of the British Isles, Ireland and mainland Europe (Nordeide & Edwards, 2019; Price & Raffield, 2023). They headed west to discover lands previously unknown to Europeans, such as Greenland and the east coast of North America (Ingstad & Ingstad, 2000). However, they adopted Christianity in the 10th–11th centuries and gradually shifted from warlike raiders to more mainstream European societies. This is shown by their joining other European nations in collaborative events such as the crusades to the Holy Land, when the fleet of King Sigurd Jorsalfar of Norway reached the Kingdom of Jerusalem in AD 1110 (Murray, 2006).

In this paper published by Geber's team, (Geber et al., 2023), we are drawn into the world of the early Christian cult of St. Olaf. King Haraldsson of Norway (c. 995–1030) was canonized as Saint Olaf after his death. On the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, six burials at the pilgrimage site of S:t Olofsholm dating from 10th to 13th centuries were examined. Two of the burials showed evidence for perimortem sharp force and projectile weapon trauma, and a further individual showed charring indicating the body had been exposed to fire prior to the burial. Olaf is recorded as visiting Gotland with his troops while converting the Gutes there to Christianity, with violence being recorded in the sagas collated in the Heimskringla. Oxygen and strontium isotope analysis of dental enamel was undertaken for four of the burials. The results for three individuals were compatible with spending their childhood on Gotland but would also be compatible with other regions of Scandinavia. In contrast, the strontium value in one older adult female was incompatible with the local range for Gotland but would be compatible with Iceland, south Norway, Denmark, south Sweden and parts of Britain.

This exploration of a pilgrimage site associated with St. Olaf helps to link the legends and sagas associated with early Christianity in the Viking world. Ancient people would only undertake arduous journeys on pilgrimage if there was a good reason to make that trip. It seems quite possible that it was the nature of the people buried here that made S:t Olofsholm a site worthy of pilgrims traveling to it. We find evidence for migration and for weapon injuries in those buried at this pilgrimage site. In view of the historical texts about Olaf's conversion of Gotland, Geber's team argue that these individuals may have been involved in the Christian conversion of the island, so making the site worthy of pilgrimage.

This special issue of The International Journal of Osteoarchaeology includes papers that were initially delivered orally or as posters at the 10th International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) Bird Working Group, which took place on June 5–6, 2021. The meeting was organized and hosted by Hanneke Meijer, Samuel Walker, Liselotte Takken-Beijersbergen, Anne Karin Hufthammer, and Olaug Flatnes Bratbak from the University Museum of Bergen, University of Bergen, Norway, and Ramona Harrison from the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen, Norway.

Despite our enthusiasm and plans for hosting this meeting in Bergen on the beautiful Norwegian west coast, reality turned out to be very different from what any of us had hoped for. Due to the arrival of the COVID-19 virus in 2020 and the concomitant worldwide restrictions to travel and in-person gatherings, scientific conferences had made a drastic shift to being held online only. As the only other option would be to cancel the meeting, we decided to move the 10th ICAZ Bird Working Group meeting online as well. This was the first time in history that a BWG Meeting was hosted digitally. Despite the uncertainty about whether or not such a digital conference would really work, we were also happy to have this opportunity to come together to support one another as scholars and friends.

A big part of conferences is the social aspect that can be hard to recreate during digital events. With support of the Bergen University Fund, we were able to host the meeting through the digital platform Gather. This allowed us to add a unique social aspect to the meeting by providing an online social space where participants could interact with other participants as well as groups of other colleagues and meet new people. In this way, the treasured social side of an in-person meeting could be experienced in a digital way. The poster session was also set up in a digital space and allowed attendants to wander around virtually and peruse the posters. Although a virtual conference can be a learning curve for everyone, we luckily experienced only a few minor technical glitches.

During the two conference days, 32 oral presentations and 11 poster presentations were given, representing the fascinating breadth of research on the relationships between birds and humans. Posters and oral presentations covered the exploitation of birds by humans from the Paleolithic to the Post-Medieval period, methodologies to help identify bird remains, the paleoecological implications of past bird bone assemblages, and the symbolic roles that birds play in human societies. More than 120 participants registered for this meeting, including many students who experienced the science and collegiality of our meeting for the first time. We were particularly pleased to see several conference participants from South America, Africa, and Asia, for whom an in-person meeting in Bergen might ha

In this work, we study diet composition of prehistoric human populations of Northwest Patagonia by exploring the combination of two different approaches frequently used in bioarchaeology, Bayesian isotope mixing models, and zooarchaeological analysis. For this purpose, we compiled a large dataset of previously published δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N human and resource values, as well as zooarchaeological data, corresponding to the Middle–Late Holocene and distributed throughout Northwest Patagonia. We first propose a replicable approach to divide the region into different areas comprising human individuals that shared the same available resources and perform isotope mixing models at individual level using default (i.e., uninformative) prior distributions in the Bayesian mixing models. Then, we explore a potential complementation of isotopic and zooarchaeological evidence by introducing the frequency of zooarchaeological assemblages with the different resources, as well as NISP, as priors in the Bayesian mixing models to guide diet estimations. Additionally, we use these frequencies to analyze the possible absence of some important resources in previous analyses. Based on the species distribution and geographical location of bioarchaeological sites, we divided the region into five areas (Northwest and Northeast Neuquén, South Neuquén/Rio Negro, and Southwest and Central-east Mendoza) that differ in the resources available for potential human consumption. The results obtained show high diet variability among these areas, with individuals from Northwest and Northeast Neuquén consuming mainly large animals (i.e., guanaco and rhea, respectively) and South Neuquén/Rio Negro and Center-east and Southwest Mendoza consuming a larger diversity of resources. Our results show that considering zooarchaeological priors in the analyses results in diet composition estimations more in line with the ecological diversity present in the region than previous estimations. We propose that approaches like this, which are common in ecological studies, should be considered in bioarchaeology to make more robust estimates of diet composition.

Teeth are commonly preserved in the zooarchaeological record and can be used to estimate the age of individuals in a faunal assemblage. However, there are currently no criteria for discerning the sex of elk based on dental metric characteristics. Here, we present the results of an osteometric analysis of modern elk (Cervus elaphus manitobensis) from Great Smoky Mountains National Park to create an age profile for the sample, establish metrical parameters for evaluating sex, and discern the relationship between age and size. The analysis of tooth development stages in younger elk was combined with the assessment of occlusal wear in older elk to create an age profile of our sample population. The length and breadth of mandibular third molars produced bimodal distributions that suggest these measurements can be used to differentiate sex in this population, and diastema length showed a curvilinear association with age (R² = 0.71). This dataset provides a useful comparative sample for future studies on ageing and sexing in zooarchaeology, conservation paleobiology, and wildlife resources management.

This exploratory study aims at reconstructing human paleodiets and that of camelids—their staple animal resource—in El Bolsón, an Andean valley in Catamarca Province, NW Argentina, as a way of exploring variations in the strategies and patterns of food procurement, production, preparation, and consumption by local agricultural-pastoralist societies over the last 1500 years. We present the first systematically obtained data on carbon (¹³C/¹²C) and nitrogen (¹⁵N/¹⁴N) isotopic relationships as measured on camelid and human bone collagen. They come from five camelid individuals from Los Viscos archaeological site, dating to the last 1200 years, and from six human individuals from archaeological rescues and isolated finds bracketed between at least ca. 1300 cal CE and ca. 500 cal CE, as no other human samples are available in the study area. The results suggest that camelids consumed predominantly locally available C₃ pastures, while the human paleodiet was primarily based on C₄ plants, with camelid protein not being central to it. Here, we discuss how local productive strategies would have played a part in the selective diet of the human inhabitants and interpret this picture in the context of the larger area comprising the Andean valleys of NW Argentina.

The current paper presents one of the first bioarchaeological studies on dental disease and dietary patterns in coastal Phoenicia during the Roman period, focusing on the dentition of 145 adults from the contemporary and geographically proximal sites of Byblos, Beirut, and Tyre. Pathological conditions of the oral cavity and dental wear were used to assess intra-assemblage and inter-assemblage differences. Byblos in almost all instances exhibited higher levels of dental diseases and wear than Beirut and Tyre, suggesting a greater consumption of carbohydrates but also poorer oral hygiene and greater mechanical stress (dental wear) in this community. This difference between Beirut/Tyre and Byblos may be explained by the politico-economic status of these cities as textual sources highlight the economic and political prowess of Beirut and Tyre due to their status as colonia. In addition, within each assemblage females generally exhibited higher caries (and associated periapical cavities and ante-mortem tooth loss) than males. Although dental caries may be linked to nondietary factors, these patterns may support a more cariogenic diet for females in agreement with literary accounts reciting gender-based divisions in Roman society, at least to the extent that these would manifest in dietary patterns. The findings from this study offer important insights into major and understudied communities along the Phoenician coast. Yet, further research is required, employing complementary methods (e.g., isotopic analysis and dental calculus microdebris) and including larger datasets of Roman Phoenician assemblages.

During the final Late Holocene, there was a socio-economic reorganization among the people in the central-western of Santa Cruz, Argentina. Analysis of bone collagen revealed that hunter–gatherer groups maintained a consistent diet rich in steppe animal protein for the past 3000 years. However, there was a change in bioapatite δ¹³C values in the last 1000 years, indicating a shift in the whole diet that was not reflected in the protein component. This article seeks to evaluate the differential consumption of resources over time and between sexes among hunter–gatherer populations in the region. A total of 39 adult individuals of both sexes, recovered from stone burial structures with different chronologies, were analyzed. Quantitative diet reconstruction was achieved through the use of the Bayesian mixing model known as Food Reconstruction Using Isotopic Transferred Signals (FRUITS). The results show that the guanaco (Lama guanicoe) was the most consumed animal throughout the studied period, considering both temporal and sex differences. Additionally, there is an increased importance of plant consumption in the last millennium, particularly among females. However, this can be the result of overrepresentation of this resource in our food web samples, due to the impossibility of resolving the origin of the carbon for the formation of bioapatite values.

Stable isotope-based dietary reconstructions of late Holocene agriculturalists from Sabana de Bogotá (Colombia) are limited to the late Muisca period. Accordingly, the dietary patterns and feeding behaviors of people living during the Herrera and Early Muisca periods remain largely unknown. This study aims to present new stable isotope data to discuss the dietary patterns of agriculturalists inhabiting Nueva Esperanza (Sabana de Bogota) during the last 2300 years B.P. In addition, we present the radiocarbon chronology of the site to assess dietary change during the site occupation phases. Data for δ¹³C_col and δ¹⁵N_col were obtained from bone/dentine collagen and dental calculus from humans (n = 71) and faunal (n = 20) skeletal remains. The local isotopic ecology was investigated, and the human data were assessed by age, sex, and time period. Humans presented mostly mixed diets with a predominance of maize, supplemented by C₃ resources (plants and animals), although some individuals exhibited distinct trends across the C₃–C₄ range. According to isotopic ecology and other lines of archaeological evidence, maize and C₃ resources (plants and animals) mostly contributed to the human diets, whereas C₄-feeding animals were less important resources. Bone/dentine collagen and calculus isotope data revealed only minor differences among age groups, sexes, and periods suggesting relatively homogeneous diets at the NE society throughout the late Holocene. Likewise, both kinds of isotopic data display distinct dietary trends suggesting the effect of postmortem processes in the isotopic composition of dental calculus. The isotopic evidence for the NE site suggests similar diachronic trajectories of dietary specializations at the regional level and minor differences regarding maize incorporation into the diet and its standardized use and consumption. These results suggest at the regional level similar patterns of dietary change at the Sabana de Bogotá during the late Holocene.