Christina Warinner

Milk is a major food of global economic importance, and its consumption is regarded as a classic example of gene-culture evolution. Humans have exploited animal milk as a food resource for at least 8500 years, but the origins, spread, and scale of dairying remain poorly understood. Indirect lines of evidence, such as lipid isotopic ratios of pottery residues, faunal mortality profiles, and lactase persistence allele frequencies, provide a partial picture of this process; however, in order to understand how, where, and when humans consumed milk products, it is necessary to link evidence of consumption directly to individuals and their dairy livestock. Here we report the first direct evidence of milk consumption, the whey protein b-lactoglobulin (BLG), preserved in human dental calculus from the Bronze Age (ca. 3000 BCE) to the present day. Using protein tandem mass spectrometry, we demonstrate that BLG is a species-specific biomarker of dairy consumption, and we identify individuals consuming cattle, sheep, and goat milk products in the archaeological record. We then apply this method to human dental calculus from Greenland’s medieval Norse colonies, and report a decline of this biomarker leading up to the abandonment of the Norse Greenland colonies in the 15th century CE.

The human microbiome has become a recognized factor in promoting and maintaining health. We outline opportunities in interdisciplinary research, analytical rigor, standardization, and policy development for this relatively new and rapidly developing field. Advances in these aspects of the research community may in turn advance our understanding of human microbiome biology.

We present a critique of a paper written by two economists, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, which is forthcoming in the American Economic Review and which was uncritically highlighted in Science magazine. Their paper claims there is a causal effect of genetic diversity on economic success, positing that too much or too little genetic diversity constrains development. In particular, they argue that “the high degree of diversity among African populations and the low degree of diversity among Native American populations have been a detrimental force in the development of these regions.” We demonstrate that their argument is seriously flawed on both factual and methodological grounds. As economists and other social scientists begin exploring newly available genetic data, it is crucial to remember that nonexperts broadcasting bold claims on the basis of weak data and methods can have profoundly detrimental social and political effects.

A mid-sixteenth-century cemetery was investigated at the colonial Mixtec site of Teposcolula Yucundaa and is shown to be related to the cocoliztli pandemic of 1544-1550. This is the earliest colonial epidemic cemetery to be identified in Mexico. Through archaeogenetic and oxygen stable isotope analysis it is demonstrated that the interred individuals were local Mixtecs, and mortuary analysis sheds light on both Christian and traditional religious practices at the site. Mitochondrial haplogroup frequencies support long-term genetic continuity in the region, and carbon stable isotopes of bone collagen and enamel carbonates suggest no decrease in maize consumption during the early colonial period, despite historical evidence for a changing agricultural economy and increased wheat production at the site. The Teposcolula cemetery provides a rich and complex perspective on early colonial life in the Mixteca Alta and reaffirms the importance of archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence in investigating complex social and biological processes of the past.

Oaxaca, Mexico has been inhabited by humans for over 10,000 years. From the time of earliest habitation, this environment provided a wide floral subsistence to its human inhabitants, notably documented at the cave site of Guila Naquitz. Light stable isotopes, primarily carbon and nitrogen, have been used in dietary and environmental reconstructions throughout Mexico and Central America. We report a large isotopic study of wild and market plants from Oaxaca that demonstrates 1) overlapping δ13C values of C4 plants, including maize, and plants that utilize the Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM) pathway for biosynthesis, 2) the existence of a significant C4 grass biomass, 3) the lack of isotopic separation in the δ15N of legumes and non-leguminous plants and 4) the increase in the nitrogen isotopic composition of crop plants relative to wild plant averages. These four observations are potential complicating factors in interpretations involving the origins and spread of maize agriculture, the relative amount of maize in the diet and assessments of trophic level or meat contributions to the human diet.

Difficulty in accessing high quality reference materials has been a limiting factor in the advancement of archaeobotanical research. However, new developments in online open source content management technology and faster downloading capabilities make high quality and low cost dynamic online curation of archaeobotanical reference images increasingly feasible. We describe the establishment of Paleobot.org, an open access online reference collection database for macrobotanical, microbotanical and isotopic data to help standardize and improve the identification of archaeobotanical remains.

Stressors such as fasting or poor diet quality are thought to potentially alter the nitrogen and carbon isotopic values of animal tissues. In this study, we demonstrate an inverse correlation between growth rate and multiple tissue enrichment of δ15N, δ13C, and, to a lesser degree, δ18O in a juvenile pig. A more complex pattern is observed with respect to tissue δD and growth rate. The observed association between growth rate and tissue isotopic fractionation has important implications for paleodietary and migratory reconstructions of archaeological populations that may have been affected by famine, malnutrition, seasonal variation in food availability, and/or other factors that can affect childhood growth rates. Am J Phys Anthropol 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

In this study we examine the effects of alkaline cooking on carbon and oxygen stable isotopic ratios of mineralized tissues from nine pigs raised on monotonous mixed C3/C4 vegetarian diets. Two sources of collagen (humerus and mandible) and two sources of apatite (humerus and enamel) were analyzed. Within each diet group, humerus and mandible collagens were found to record equivalent δ13C and δ18O ratios; however, enamel apatite was found to be enriched over bone apatite by 2.3‰ in carbon and 1.7‰ in oxygen. Alkaline cooking was found to slightly, but significantly increase the Δ13Ccollagen-diet and Δ18Ocollagen-diet of bone collagen. A similar trend towards enrichment was observed in bone and enamel Δ13Capatite-diet and Δ18O apatite-diet, but the differences were not significant. Observed isotopic shifts were consistent with increased nutrient utilization of the alkaline-cooked maize as compared to raw maize. In addition, a reexamination of the relationship between diet and tissue carbon isotopic values suggests that species and alimentary type should be considered when interpreting ancient diets.

Controlled feeding studies have been useful in assessing the relationship between isotope values from dietary sources and consumer tissues. We report the organic oxygen and hydrogen values of animal tissue from a porcine controlled dietary study. A complex mixture of fractionation and incorporation is revealed. In both δD and δ18O, differences in the absolute values and the amount of variation between and within consumer tissue are documented. Significant differences in δD and δ18O are observed between protein sources such as keratin and collagen. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

As its title suggests, this book presents the current state of method and theory in paleoethnobotany, synonymously termed archaeobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains and human-plant inter- actions in the past. We conceive of this volume as an homage to, and descendent of, two defining works in the field: the edited volume, Current Paleoethnobotany:
Analytical Methods and Cultural Interpretations of Archaeological Plant Remains (Hastorf and Popper 1988) and the two editions of Paleoethnobotany: A Handbook of Procedures (Pearsall 1989, 2000). Both are
staples of any paleoethnobotanist’s office or labora- tory reference shelf and both engage with the chal- lenge of interpreting plant data from archaeological sites. It speaks to the continuing relevance of Current Paleoethnobotany in particular that even after twenty- five years many of its chapters continue to be relevant and regularly cited. Here we attempt to build upon the success of these two seminal volumes by covering subjects that reflect recent technical, methodological, and theoretical advances in the field and by inviting a wide variety of scholars to write on the subjects in which they are expert. We have also taken advantage of this opportunity to update bibliographies to reflect the expansion of botanical studies in archaeology over the past two and a half decades and to incorporate the increasing diversity of scientific studies of human- plant interactions in the past. This volume builds upon the tradition of edited volumes in the field of paleoethnobotany. Such volumes have often come about as published ver- sions of conference sessions, typically at meetings of the Society for American
Archaeology (SAA; e.g., Gremillion 1997; Hastorf and Popper 1988; Scarry 1993b) or the International Work Group for Palaeoethnobotany (IWGP; e.g., van Zeist and Casparie 1984; van Zeist et al. 1991), but also resulting from ad hoc symposia (e.g., Hart 1999, 2008). This book has a similar origin: it was conceived during a session at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the SAA in St. Louis organized by two of us (d’Alpoim Guedes and Warinner), in which Marston and several of the contributing authors were participants. We three editors then planned and organized an electronic symposium at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the SAA in Sacramento and invited authors to write on specific topics that would form the basis for this volume. We are thankful that additional authors who were not able to attend the ses- sion were able to submit chapters in the following months to expand and strengthen this volume.
The structure of this book roughly follows the process of paleoethnobo- tanical analysis. Part I deals with formation processes of macro- and micro- botanical remains, whereas part II discusses their recovery and identification, as well as strategies for data management. Part III focuses on quantitative analysis of plant macroremains and methods for interpreting intra- and intersite variation. Part IV describes the integration of botanical macrore- mains with other allied data types, focusing especially on nascent molecu- lar technologies and remote sensing. Finally, the three chapters of part V take three distinct theoretical approaches to the interpretation of archaeological plant remains and illustrate potential avenues for future investigation. We leave out the integration of plant and animal remains deliberately, as it has been treated fully in a recent edited volume (VanDerwarker and Peres 2010) and multiple articles (especially see Smith and Miller 2009 and associated articles).
Our hope is that this volume will serve the field for the next three decades as well as Current Paleoethnobotany has for the past twenty-five years. As we describe in chapter 1 of this volume, many of the technologies and analyses described at length here were not possible in the 1980s, nor even imagined to affect archaeology as much as they have. Certainly, as Ford recently predicted (2003:xvi; 2004:xiv), the successor to this volume will focus increasingly on recent and future advances made in molecular and computational archaeology and on the expansion of a truly global archaeology, including work beyond the traditional European and North American sites so well studied to date. The inclusion of the diverse voices of paleoethnobotanists from developing coun- tries will be a welcome addition to the already rich and productive dialogues in our field.

Paleodietary reconstruction can provide great insights into social and environmental processes of the past. Three principal lines of research are typically applied to the investigation of ancient diet: paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, and stable isotope analysis. A fourth approach, ancient DNA analysis, has recently emerged and offers great promise for increased taxonomic res- olution and the identification of genes under natural and artificial selection (see Wales et al., chapter 15, this volume). From microscopy to mass spectrometry to molecular biology, archaeologists have at their finger- tips a diverse range of tools to make inferences about ancient diet from the atomic to the macroscopic level. However, although such a wealth of tools is available, relatively few studies employ more than one approach. With a special emphasis on stable isotope analysis and paleoethnobotany, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the benefits of a multidisciplinary approach and to explore how the combined efforts of each discipline can contribute to a more complete understanding of ancient diet.

The Teposcolula Grand Plaza Cemetery provides a unique opportunity to examine the social and biological dimensions of early colonial life at Teposcolula and to investigate the impact of epidemic disease in the Mixteca Alta during the mid-16th century. In order to better understand and contextualize the cemetery, genetic and stable isotope analysis was performed on forty-one colonial era individuals from the Grand Plaza Cemetery. Additionally, seven Postclassic individuals from the Churchyard (n=5) and residential terraces (n=2) were also analyzed for comparison. This is the first genetic and first isotopic study of an ancient population in the Mixteca.

Modern human behavior, ranging from tool use to cooking to agriculture to industrial food processing, has allowed us to colonize virtually every environment on Earth – and even parts of outer space. Our love of grains and tubers has increased the number of our starch-digesting genes, and our taste for dairy has genetically altered at least 10% of the human population to do something no other mammal can do – digest milk after weaning. We have turned grassy weeds into corn, cyanide laced seeds into almonds, and bitter flowers into broccoli. And we are not alone - we also carry within us trillions of microbes that we feed with the indigestible, fibrous parts of our diets, and they in turn make our vitamins, protect us from food poisoning and food allergies, and modulate our metabolism. This talk will explore the dramatic changes that have occurred in human diets over the past 50,000 years and discuss how these changes have fundamentally affected human biology, ecology, and societies.

The advent of high throughput metagenomic sequencing has revealed a startling fact - that our bodies are not merely ourselves. Microorganisms comprise 90% of our cells and perform vital functions in digestion, immune system maintenance, and homeostasis. Drawing on research from both living populations and archaeological samples, this talk explores the complex relationship between humans and our resident microbes.