Cookies

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. By continuing to browse this repository, you give consent for essential cookies to be used. You can read more about our Privacy and Cookie Policy.


Durham Research Online
You are in:

Source of strontium in archaeological mobility studies—marine diet contribution to the isotopic composition

Lahtinen, Maria and Arppe, Laura and Nowell, Geoff (2021) 'Source of strontium in archaeological mobility studies—marine diet contribution to the isotopic composition.', Archaeological and anthropological sciences., 13 (1). p. 1.

Abstract

The strontium isotope composition of human tissues is widely used in archaeological mobility studies. However, little attention is paid to the relative contributions of terrestrial versus marine sources of strontium in these studies. There is some debate over the role of a solid diet versus drinking water as the most important source of strontium for the human body, with related possibilities of misinterpretation of the archaeological record if only strontium isotope compositions of the biosphere are studied. However, there is a third component, marine strontium, which is commonly not assumed to contribute towards the strontium isotope composition of archaeological skeletal remains, especially in locations that are not directly coastal. To illustrate the potentially obfuscating effects of mixed Sr sources in a human population, we present a case study of twelve individuals from the medieval Finnish site Iin Hamina with a known dietary history. Our study shows that marine consumption is a significant factor explaining the strontium isotope composition of the Iin Hamina human remains, with implication of erroneous conclusions about immigration without prior knowledge of diet composition. Thus, future studies should always incorporate a rigorous analysis of dietary history, with special regard to potential consumption of aquatic resources, when strontium isotope analysis is used as a method in the study of palaeomobility.

Item Type:Article
Full text:(VoR) Version of Record
Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
Download PDF
(1784Kb)
Status:Peer-reviewed
Publisher Web site:https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-020-01240-w
Publisher statement:This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Date accepted:13 November 2020
Date deposited:13 May 2021
Date of first online publication:05 December 2020
Date first made open access:13 May 2021

Save or Share this output

Export:
Export
Look up in GoogleScholar