Dr. Steven
D. Emslie, University of North Carolina, Department of Biology and Marine
Biology, and Dr.William P. Patterson, Saskatchewan Isotope Laboratory,
University of Saskatchewan, Canada initiated a collaboration with the Perdigões
Research Project.
They
propose to complete stable isotope analyses of δ13C and δ15N on human remains
that have been recovered in Perdigões, in an attempt to understand past diets
and variations in diets among the people that lived and circulated there. The
well-preserved human bone at Perdigões will be ideal for analyzing collagen for
both stable isotopes and mercury using small samples (< 5 g) from each
skeleton. These isotopes will provide
information on the major trophic level from which these people were subsisting,
and whether they had a diet based largely on wild plants and grains or included
meat or perhaps some marine-based food sources.
Recent
research on strontium isotopes from human remains at this site suggests that
the people at this site were from out site the regions where Perdigões is
located. The analyses of stable isotopes
and mercury may provide additional support for this hypothesis as people
migrating from different regions are likely to have considerable variation in
δ13C and δ15N in their bone, averaged over a lifetime, as well as different
exposures to mercury
A pilot
study is undergoing using 20 small samples of human bone (from 20 individuals)
from existing collections from Chalcolithic Tomb 1 and 2 and from Neolithic pit
graves and Chalcolithic cremated remains.
The first results are quite surprising and will be presented at 37th
Annual Meeting of the Joint Society of Ethnobiology & Society for Economic
Botany Conference, Cherokee, NC, from May 11–14, 2014.
A larger sub-project
will be designed for future research in the context of the Global Archaeological
Research Programme of Perdigões.
