ANTH 235,
RECONSTRUCTING SUBSISTENCE & DIET
In discussing early subsistence (the quest for food) , it is useful to distinguish meals (direct evidence of what people were eating at a particular time) and diet (the pattern of people’s consumption over a long period of time).
EVIDENCE OF MEALS:
 historical accounts
 depictions in art of various media
 actual preserved remains of foodstuffs (dried, frozen, charred, residues, coprolites/boluses [feces], etc.)
 ethnoarchaeology helps establish a range of what people might have eaten
EVIDENCE OF DIET (a much trickier problem):
 human remains (isotopic analysis of bones; soft tissue analysis, where preserved)
 zooarchaeology or archaeozoology (the study of the past human use of animals)
 paleoethnobotany or archaeobotany (the study of the past human use of plants)
In the interpretation of food remains, a crucial question to be addressed is:
“To what extent do a site’s food remains
represent the inhabitants’ total diet?”

WHAT CAN PLANT FOODS TELL US ABOUT PAST DIETS?
Macrobotanical remains : larger fragments of preserved vegetal material
Microbotanical remains:
 phytoliths (“plant opals” are silica bodies that form in the cellular systems of many plants, especially grasses, including rice and bamboo)
 pollen grains (the study of which is called palynology )
Other lines of botanical evidence:
 chemical residues (proteins, fatty lipids, even DNA)
 plant impressions (fired clay: pot sherds, building bricks, floors, etc.)
 tools and other processing equipment
 plant residues on artifacts (microwear analysis reveals polishes; sometimes phytoliths are embedded in stone and bone tools; residues on cooking pots)
 documentary record (economic texts or even literature)
 cookery (electron spin resonance, or ESR, can measure the highest temperature to which a material was subjected and the duration of that heating)

EXAMPLE: ESR successfully distinguished baked cereal griddlecakes from boiled cereal porridge when recovered from the stomach of 2000 year-old Lindow
Man ( below ), discovered in Cheshire, England in 1984
Sidebar: Lindow Man’s Last Meal
The Lindow Man’s stomach contained sphagnum moss spores, crushed wheat, bran and barley grains, and mistletoe pollen.
Electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy showed that he had eaten burned griddlecakes before he died. When food is cooked, the reactions that take place create molecules with unpaired electrons. ESR spectroscopy can determine thermal decomposition in organic matter by detecting such molecules with unpaired electrons. The food’s molecular structure changes according to the intensity of the heat. From ESR spectra, it is possible to estimate the highest temperature the food reached while being cooked: boiled, 100

C; baked, 200-300

C or hotter, if burned.

SUBSISTENCE INFORMATION FROM ANIMAL
RESOURCES:
Methods for proving the human exploitation of animals in the Early Stone Age (Paleolithic):
 mere association of animal bones and stone tools is insufficient
 better evidence comes from cut marks of stone tools on bones themselves (microscopic technique)
 artificial concentrations of bones in particular places
(mammoth-bone dwellings in the Ukraine and southern Russia)
 burning of bones (perhaps for fuel rather than consumption)
 electron spin resonance (ESR can provide an object’s thermal history)
INVESTIGATING DIET, SEASONALITY, AND
DOMESTICATION:
Steps in analyzing a macrofaunal bone assemblage:
 identify the remains as specifically as possible
 quantify the remains (numbers of animals & species represented, meat equivalent represented)
 determine strategies of use (seasonality of exploitation from age/sex ratios)

 animal domestication (relevant to only the last 10,000 years)
 look for evidence of disease and demographic structure of population
 evaluate the context of the remains (individual bones
& assemblages)
HOW WERE ANIMAL RESOURCES EXPLOITED?
In addition to the remains of the animals themselves, there are three primary classes of information that can inform us of this behavior:
 tools (including nets, traps, snares, bows/arrows, etc.)
 art and documents
 residues (blood, fats, and phosphates especially; sometimes hair and collagen, even on 90,000 year-old stone tools from Tabūn, Israel ( below ); prints and tracks)

ASSESSING DIET FROM HUMAN REMAINS:
The human skeleton and preserved tissues are obviously the best direct sources of information about past diet.
Identification of individual meals:
 stomach contents (preserved only under extraordinary circumstances; natural and intentional mummies, “bog bodies” like Lindow Man)
 preserved or fossilized fecal material
(boluses & coprolites)
Paramylodon (Ice Age giant ground sloth) bolus, Texas

Teeth and bones as evidence of diet:
 microscopic examination of abrasions on tooth wear surfaces as clue to foods consumed
 tooth decay and loss often indicate increase in consumption of starchy and sugary food associated with onset of agriculture
 carbon isotope analysis of bone collagen can indicate heavy reliance on certain types of plants or on marine resources due to the variation in carbon isotopes, 13 C and 12 C
 nitrogen isotope analysis (low ratio of 15 N to 14 N indicates agricultural subsistence, while a high ratio points to marine subsistence)
 analysis of carbon and nitrogen isotopes can be used together (measuring the amounts of 13 C and 15 N in fossilized Neanderthal bones from the cave of
Maurillac, in the Charente, France led archaeologists to conclude that their diet was almost exclusively carnivorous)
 analysis of strontium (Sr, a stable mineral component of bone) against calcium (Ca) ratios can also yield dietary information: vegetarian has high Sr:Ca ratio, carnivore has low Sr:Ca ratio .

Since we understand increasingly what a “good” or balanced diet entails, we can now begin to examine past diets in terms of their nutritional value and approach the archaeologist’s ultimate goal in this arena: accurate assessment of the state of health of our ancestors.