In the second century CE the Roman Empire had increasing contact with Sarmatians, nomadic Iranian speakers occupying an area stretching from the Pontic-Caspian steppe to the Carpathian mountains, both in the Caucasus and in the Danubian borders of the empire. In 175 CE, following their defeat in the Marcomannic Wars, emperor Marcus Aurelius drafted Sarmatian cavalry into Roman legions and deployed 5,500 Sarmatian soldiers to Britain, as recorded by contemporary historian Cassius Dio. Little is known about where the Sarmatian cavalry were stationed, and no individuals connected with this historically attested event have been identified to date, leaving its impact on Britain largely unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChild labour is the most common form of child abuse in the world today, with almost half of child workers employed in hazardous industries. The large-scale employment of children during the rapid industrialisation of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in England is well documented. During this period, the removal of pauper children from workhouses in cities to work as apprentices in rural mills in the North of England was commonplace.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDNA analysis demonstrates that all seven individuals buried in an Early Iron Age barrow at Dolge njive, southeast Slovenia, are close biological relatives. Although group composition does not suggest strict adherence to a patrilineal or matrilineal kinship system, the funerary tradition appears highly gendered, with family links through both the male and female line being important in structuring communities. We explore the implications for our understandings of kinship and funerary practices in Early Iron Age southeast Europe.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany of the most significant archaeological sites in Europe were excavated by antiquarians over one hundred years ago. Modern museum collections therefore frequently contain human remains that were recovered during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here we apply multi-isotope analysis (Sr/Sr, O, C, N) and C dating to evaluate the provenance of human remains within a collection that is thought to have been recovered from one of the most important archaeological sites in Britain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe barrow cemetery at Heath Wood, Derbyshire, is the only known Viking cremation cemetery in the British Isles. It dates to the late ninth century and is associated with the over-wintering of the Viking Great Army at nearby Repton in AD 873-4. Only the cremated remains of three humans and of a few animals are still available for research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study documents a transect of Sr/Sr values from a variety of plant, soil and rock samples across the ancient woodland of the Sherwood Forest National Nature Reserve (SFNNR) and into adjoining farmland in Britain. All samples were collected from the Triassic Sherwood Sandstone Group. A shift of +0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: This study tests, for the first time, the applicability of a new method of sex estimation utilizing enamel peptides on a sample of deciduous and permanent teeth at different stages of mineralization, from nonadults of unknown sex, including perinates.
Materials And Methods: A total of 43 teeth from 29 nonadult individuals aged from 40 gestational weeks to 19 years old were analyzed. The sample included pairs of fully mineralized and just developing teeth from the same individual.
After the Battle Dunbar between English and Scottish forces in 1650, captured Scottish soldiers were imprisoned in Durham and many hundreds died there within a few weeks. The partial skeletal remains of 28 of these men were discovered in 2013. Building on previous osteological work, here we report wide-ranging scientific studies of the remains to address the following questions: Did they have comparable diet, health and disease throughout their lives? Did they have common histories of movement (or lack of movement) during their childhoods? Can we create a collective biography of these men? Strontium and oxygen isotope analysis of tooth enamel investigated childhood movement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: A multi-isotope study was conducted on individuals buried at Skriðuklaustur monastery (AD 1493-1554) to investigate their geographic origins and dietary composition. Comparative material from individuals excavated from Skeljastaðir, an inland farm site was also analyzed.
Materials And Methods: Bone collagen was extracted from 50 humans (Skriðuklaustur and Skeljastaðir) and 25 animals (Skriðuklaustur) and analyzed for δ C, δ N, and δ S.
For human dental enamel, what is the precise mineralization progression spatially and the precise timing of mineralization? This is an important question in the fundamental understanding of matrix-mediated biomineralization events, but in particular because we can use our understanding of this natural tissue growth in humans to develop biomimetic approaches to repair and replace lost enamel tissue. It is important to understand human tissues in particular since different species have quite distinct spatial and temporal progression of mineralization. In this study, five human central incisors at different stages of enamel maturation/mineralization were spatially mapped using synchrotron X-ray diffraction and X-ray microtomography techniques.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Recent developments in incremental dentine analysis allowing increased temporal resolution for tissues formed during the first 1,000 days of life have cast doubt on the veracity of weaning studies using bone collagen carbon (δ C) and nitrogen (δ N) isotope ratio data from infants. Here, we compare published bone data from the well-preserved Anglo-Saxon site of Raunds Furnells, England, with co-forming dentine from the same individuals, and investigate the relationship of these with juvenile stature. The high-resolution isotope data recorded in dentine allow us to investigate the relationship of diet with juvenile stature during this critical period of life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis research explores oral health indicators and stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data to explore diet, and differences in diet, between people buried in the four different contexts of the St Gertrude Church cemetery (15th- 17th centuries AD): the general cemetery, two mass graves, and a collective mass burial pit within the general cemetery. The main aim is to assess whether people buried in the mass graves were rural immigrants, or if they were more likely to be the victims of plague (or another epidemic) who lived in Riga and its suburbs. The data produced (from dental disease assessments and isotope analyses) were compared within, as well as between, the contexts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
December 2017
Objectives: The nature of land use and mobility during the transition to agriculture has often been debated. Here, we use isotope analysis of tooth enamel from human populations buried in two different Neolithic burial monuments, Penywyrlod and Ty Isaf, in south-east Wales, to examine patterns of land use and to evaluate where individuals obtained their childhood diet.
Materials And Methods: We employ strontium ( Sr/ Sr) and oxygen (δ O) and carbon (δ C) isotope analysis of enamel from adjacent molars.
We have examined the remains of a Pilgrim burial from St Mary Magdalen, Winchester. The individual was a young adult male, aged around 18-25 years at the time of death. Radiocarbon dating showed the remains dated to the late 11th-early 12th centuries, a time when pilgrimages were at their height in Europe.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe major components of human diet both past and present may be estimated by measuring the carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios (δ13C and δ15N) of the collagenous proteins in bone and tooth dentine. However, the results from these two tissues differ substantially: bone collagen records a multi-year average whilst primary dentine records and retains time-bound isotope ratios deriving from the period of tooth development. Recent studies harnessing a sub-annual temporal sampling resolution have shed new light on the individual dietary histories of our ancestors by identifying unexpected radical short-term dietary changes, the duration of breastfeeding and migration where dietary change occurs, and by raising questions regarding factors other than diet that may impact on δ13C and δ15N values.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDevelopment of agriculture is often assumed to be accompanied by a decline in residential mobility, and sedentism is frequently proposed to provide the basis for economic intensification, population growth and increasing social complexity. In Britain, however, the nature of the agricultural transition (ca 4000 BC) and its effect on residence patterns has been intensely debated. Some authors attribute the transition to the arrival of populations who practised a system of sedentary intensive mixed farming similar to that of the very earliest agricultural regimes in central Europe, ca 5500 BC, with cultivation of crops in fixed plots and livestock keeping close to permanently occupied farmsteads.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMigration within the Roman Empire occurred at multiple scales and was engaged in both voluntarily and involuntarily. Because of the lengthy tradition of classical studies, bioarchaeological analyses must be fully contextualized within the bounds of history, material culture, and epigraphy. In order to assess migration to Rome within an updated contextual framework, strontium isotope analysis was performed on 105 individuals from two cemeteries associated with Imperial Rome-Casal Bertone and Castellaccio Europarco-and oxygen and carbon isotope analyses were performed on a subset of 55 individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe purported migrations that have formed the peoples of Britain have been the focus of generations of scholarly controversy. However, this has not benefited from direct analyses of ancient genomes. Here we report nine ancient genomes (∼ 1 ×) of individuals from northern Britain: seven from a Roman era York cemetery, bookended by earlier Iron-Age and later Anglo-Saxon burials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Stable isotope ratios of carbon (δ(13)C) and nitrogen (δ(15)N) in bone and dentine collagen have been used for over 30 years to estimate palaeodiet, subsistence strategy, breastfeeding duration and migration within burial populations. Recent developments in dentine microsampling allow improved temporal resolution for dietary patterns.
Aim: A simple method is proposed which could be applied to human teeth to estimate chronological age represented by dentine microsamples in the direction of tooth growth, allowing comparison of dietary patterns between individuals and populations.
New evidence for cattle husbandry practices during the earliest period of the southern Scandinavian Neolithic indicates multiple birth seasons and dairying from its start. Sequential sampling of tooth enamel carbonate carbon and oxygen isotope ratio analyses and strontium isotopic provenancing indicate more than one season of birth in locally reared cattle at the earliest Neolithic Funnel Beaker (EN I TRB, 3950-3500 cal. B.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Studies of the carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios (δ(13) C and δ(15) N) of modern tissues with a fast turnover, such as hair and fingernails, have established the relationship between these values in mothers and their infants during breastfeeding and weaning. Using collagen from high-resolution dentine sections of teeth, which form in the perinatal period we investigate the relationship between diet and physiology in this pivotal stage of life.
Materials And Methods: Childhood dentine collagen δ(13) C and δ(15) N profiles were produced from horizontal sections of permanent and deciduous teeth following the direction of development.
Objective: The complex biological, physicochemical process of human dental enamel formation begins in utero and for most teeth takes several years to complete. Lost enamel tissue cannot regenerate, therefore a better understanding of the spatial and temporal progression of mineralization of this tissue is needed in order to design improved in vivo mineral growth processes for regenerative dentistry and allow the possibility to grow a synthetic whole or partial tooth.
Method: Human dental enamel samples across a range of developmental stages available through archaeological collections have been used to explore the spatial and temporal progression of enamel biomineralization.
Rapid Commun Mass Spectrom
February 2013
Rationale: The 19th century excavation of an exceptionally well-preserved Early Bronze Age high status log-coffin burial from northern England, dated to 2200-2020 BC, yielded a 'food residue' collected from the inside of an accompanying bark vessel. This residue contained fibrous stitching that was used to hold the bark walls of the vessel together, first described as animal sinews, although the surviving material clearly contains animal hairs. Protein sequencing by soft ionisation mass spectrometry should identify the proteins that constitute the material, as well as the animal species from which they derive.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHistorical evidence documents mass migration from Ireland to London during the period of the Great Irish Famine of 1845-52. The rural Irish were reliant on a restricted diet based on potatoes but maize, a C(4) plant, was imported from the United States of America in 1846-47 to mitigate against Famine. In London, Irish migrants joined a population with a more varied diet.
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