J Archaeol Sci 32 (1)

In this pilot-study, which was designed to assess the range of isotopic variation in English medieval populations, the authors present the results of stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen of human and animal bone collagen from three later medieval sites in Northern England. The isotopic values observed for the rural hospital of St. Giles by Brompton Bridge (N. Yorks.), the Augustinian Friary at Warrington and a mass-grave with casualties from the Battle of Towton (N. Yorks.) are significantly different from those reported for other archaeological populations in Britain, namely by their very enriched delta15N ratios which are combined with almost entirely terrestrial carbon signals. The authors discuss possible explanations for the unusual human data and argue on grounds of the available faunal data, that a mixed diet of terrestrial, marine and freshwater resources is most likely. This may indicate the significant impact of the medieval fasting regulations on everyday subsistence. They conclude that stable isotope analysis can complement the available historical information on diet in the Middle Ages.

Separate cemeteries and/or burial loci for infants have been variously interpreted as reflecting segregation by age, infanticide or even child sacrifice. Attempts to distinguish between these factors rely primarily on the age distribution found. Currently long bone length is the most commonly used method for foetuses and infants in the perinatal period, but its accuracy is affected by the inherent variation in size for age. The authors show how to distinguish between death in the perinatal period and that occurring later in infancy through identification of the neonatal line in ground sections of deciduous teeth. The methodology is reviewed and applied to validate estimations of postnatal survival for infant remains recovered from two archaeological sites in Israel.

It has been demonstrated that the protein osteocalcin can survive in bone in the archaeological record, and postulated that it has the potential to survive over geological time periods. The precise mechanism for this longevity of survival is not yet fully understood, and has not been extensively studied in comparison to other diagenetic aspects of archaeological bone. The authors report a comparison between osteocalcin survival and the state of preservation of more than sixty bones from fourteen archaeological sites. The amount of osteocalcin, assayed immunologically, was compared with diagenetic parameters that measure: the amount of 'collagen' in the bone, the mineral changes, the porosity, and the histological preservation of the material. The findings indicate that microbial taphonomy and mineral alteration of bone have a profoundly damaging effect on the preservation of osteocalcin.

The authors present a new methodology for developing sample-specific metric sex determination methods using unidentified individuals that can be applied to archaeological samples. The methodology does not require the assessment of sex of a large sample from pelvic morphological features as a first step in developing the method and instead is developed from a sample of individuals with sex unknown. The procedure involves using the overall mean of a measurement collected from the sample of unknowns as the discriminant criteria for determining the sex of the individuals in that sample. Experiments with various sample sizes and sex ratios using distal humerus measurements suggest that allocation accuracies of 83-96% can be expected when the sample used to develop the method is greater than forty individuals and the sex ratio is less than 1.5:1. The utility of the methodology is explored using the Lisbon Collection (Portugal) and an archaeological sample from Canada is tested as an example. The Lisbon Collection data indicate that joint measurements of long bones will provide the highest allocation accuracies. The results from the Canadian sample confirm that humerus joint measurements consistently provide the highest allocation accuracies (88-100%) even when the sex ratio in the sample used to develop the method is estimated at 1.9:1.