Prehistoric human diet composition in Northwest Patagonia: Complementing isotopic analysis with zooarchaeological information

AbstractIn 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., uninforma tive) 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 gui de 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 Neuqué n, South Neuquén/Rio Negro, and Southwest and Central-east Mendoza) that differ in the resources available for potential human consumption. The results obtained...
Source: International Journal of Osteoarchaeology - Category: Science Authors: Tags: SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER Source Type: research