Life histories from the Southside Cemetery, St. John's, Newfoundland: Insights into Royal Naval diet using stable isotopes

Abstract

While the Southside Cemetery, St. John's, Newfoundland was excavated in 1979, previous historical and morphological investigations had been unable to distinguish between potential associations: Royal Navy, Royal Army, early Newfoundland settlers, and recent Anglican parishioners from the south side of St. John's harbour. Due to the difficulty of discerning between these hypotheses with historical and morphological investigations alone, stable isotope analyses of bone collagen and tooth enamel carbonate (δ13CCOLL, δ13CCARB, δ15NCOLL, and δ18OCARB) were used to examine the diet and geographic origins of skeletal remains (n = 21) from the Southside Cemetery in St. John's, Newfoundland. In order to distinguish between local and likely British origins, data from these individuals were compared to bone collagen and enamel carbonate isotope values of a civilian population from St. Paul's Anglican Church, Harbour Grace, Newfoundland (n = 6), and to published values from Newfoundland and the British Isles. These comparisons, along with a strong historical and archaeological context, suggest that individuals from the Southside Cemetery were associated with the St. John's Naval Hospital's use of the cemetery from ca. 1750–1825. This study then considers these data with previously published data of contemporaneous Royal Naval Hospital cemeteries within their historical contexts to better understand naval rations and movement in the British Atlantic World. This re-examination of the data, with an emphasis on historical and physiological contexts, highlights factors previously undervalued that limit the ability of stable isotope analyses to define the variability of naval rations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.