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I.5 - Chemical Approaches to Dietary Representation

from Part I - Determining What Our Ancestors Ate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Ted Rathbun
Edited by
Kenneth F. Kiple  and
Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas
Kenneth F. Kiple
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
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Summary

Dietary reconstruction for past populations holds significant interest as it relates to biological and cultural adaptation, stability, and change. Although archaeological recovery of floral and faunal remains within a prehistoric or historical context provides some direct evidence of the presence (and sometimes quantity) of potential food resources, indirect evidence for the dietary significance of such foodstuffs frequently must be deduced from other bioarchaeological data.

The types of data with dietary significance range from recovered plant and animal remains through evidence of pathology associated with diet, growth disruption patterns, and coprolite contents. Other traditional approaches involving the people themselves – as represented by skeletal remains – include demographic (Buikstra and Mielke 1985) and metabolic (Gilbert 1985) stress patterns.

In addition to bioanthropological analyses, reconstruction of environmental factors and the availability and limits of food species and their distribution for a population with a particular size, technology, and subsistence base are typical components within an archaeological reconstruction. Although these physical aspects are significant, the distribution, or more likely the restriction, of particular foodstuffs from certain segments of the population (because of sex, age, status, food avoidance, or food taboos) may be important cultural system features. The seasonal availability of food and its procurement, preservation, and preparation may also have influenced group dietary patterns and nutritional status (Wing and Brown 1979).

Analysis of skeletal remains may also provide some direct evidence of diet. Type and adequacy of diet have long been of interest to physical anthropologists, especially osteologists and paleopathologists (Gilbert and Mielke 1985; Larsen 1987). More recently, direct chemical analysis of bones and teeth has been attempted in an effort to assess the body’s metabolism and storage of nutritive minerals and other elements. L. L. Klepinger (1984) has reviewed the potential application of this approach for nutritional assessment and summarized the early findings reported in the anthropological literature. (In addition, see Volume 14 of the Journal of Human Evolution [1985], which contains significant research surveys to that date.)

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The Cambridge World History of Food , pp. 58 - 63
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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