Testing Stable Isotopes of Human Dental Calculus as a Nondestructive Proxy for Paleodiet

• Main Author: Simon Poulson
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: Arctic Data Center 2017
• Subjects: dental calculus; diet; stable isotopes; carbon; nitrogen; Arctic; Greenland; Iceland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.18739/A29P2W73Z

The primary biomaterial used for stable isotope analysis to study diet in prehistoric and protohistoric populations is bone collagen, and requires destructive analysis and hence may dissuade museum curators from allowing access to this material. This study has investigated the use of dental calculus as an alternative to bone collagen, as it is a secondary or "add-on" biomaterial, which may ease access to required material for analysis. The goals of this research have been to determine whether stable isotope analysis of dental calculus can be used as an alternative to bone collagen, and whether the isotopic composition of dental calculus is a reliable indicator of the isotopic composition of diet. This study has performed stable isotope (d13C, d15N) and elemental analysis (weight% C, weight% N) of dental calculus for a number of opportunistically-sampled locations, including Greenland, Iceland and other non-Arctic locations. The majority of analyses have been performed using bulk dental calculus, but the organic carbon fraction (i.e. removal of the carbonate fraction by treatment with acid) has also been analyzed when sufficient material is available. Results of elemental analysis demonstrate that the atomic C/N ratio of dental calculus is a key indicator of possible post-depositional chemical alteration, as noted and proposed by previous researchers. For dental calculus samples that pass the C/N quality control criterion, results of stable isotope analysis indicate that the isotopic composition of dental calculus shows good correlation with the isotopic composition of bone collagen for the same populations, and hence that the isotopic composition of dental calculus shows promise as an alternate biomaterial to bone collagen as an indicator of diet history when bone collagen material may be unavailable.