Deconstructing the δ15N Paleodietary Proxy: Implications of Culturally-Mediated Food Behavior for Trophic Position Reconstruction

Dietary strategies are often key drivers of biological evolution. Understanding past diet is critical to understanding environment, behavior, and ecological relationships of both hominins and modern humans. Chemistry is useful to examine microscopic dietary traces inside organisms to reconstruct their origins. This project focuses on isotopic mass effects in processes involving nitrogen, an element commonly used in paleodietary reconstruction. The ratio of nitrogen isotopes in organisms (δ15N) is reflective of trophic position, but nitrogen isotope fractionation is complex and subject to many sources of variation. This dissertation explores how human behavior might influence this variation. Our overarching aim is to investigate the impact of food-related behaviors on the δ15N dietary proxy. The dissertation is broken down into four chapters. Chapter 1 deals with an experimental approach to assessing the impact of food processing and prey selection. For Chapter 2, we take a foray into plant foods and examine the impact of physiology and nitrogen partitioning. By Chapter 3, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a pivot to a data mining approach to this question using the modern food science literature. Finally, we bring it all together with Chapter 4 in a case study related to Neanderthal diet at the site of Saint-Césaire.

Author

• Foecke, Kimberly Kjaisa

Language

• en

Date created

• 2022

Type of Work

• Dissertation

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Human Paleobiology

Degree

• Ph.D.

Advisor

• Brooks, Alison S

Committee Member(s)

• France, Christine A M
• Barr, William A
• Braun, David
• Henry, Amanda

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/6h440t294