Bone collagen stable nitrogen and carbon isotopes as indicators of past human diet and landscape use in southeastern South Australia

Abstract

Stable carbon isotope palaeodietary research at the Roonka Flat archaeological site, lower Murray River, South Australia (Pate and Schoeninger 1993; Pate 1995a, 1995b) suggested that there was minimal movement of people and/or food between the inland riverine area and the southeastern coastal and arid interior regions of South Australia during the late Holocene. Other archaeological and physical anthropological data, for example, cemetery and site distributions and numbers and cranial non-metric traits (see Pardoe 1995) also provide evidence for increased sedentism and territoriality in the lower Murray region during the late Holocene. Thus, in some cases, bone chemistry analyses can provide archaeologists with an independent method to assess past human dietary composition, landscape use, sedentism and territoriality. Along with similar bone collagen  I´ 13 C  studies at Broadbeach, Queensland and Swanport, South Australia (Hobson and Collier 1984; Collier and Hobson 1987), the Roonka Flat programme has established stable isotope palaeodietary analyses as a productive research area within Australian archaeology (Pate 1997a). The present paper reports the results of the first application of dual isotope (carbon and nitrogen) palaeodietary analysis to precontact human bone collagen in Australia. The use of stable nitrogen isotopes in addition to carbon isotopes in palaeodietary research via plots of I´ 13 C versus I´ 15 N values for past human diet and potential food sources (cf. Walker and DeNiro 1986; Keegan and DeNiro 1988; Little and Schoeninger 1995) provides better discrimination regarding dietary inferences than single isotope analyses. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values for human bone from the Roonka Flat site are compared with isotopic values for a variety of marine, riverine and terrestrial foods in order to provide additional information regarding the dietary composition of this inland riverine population during the late Holocene.