Anthropology 2229F/G Lecture : Lecture 22 – Human Skeletal Remains and Subsistence Practice

• School: Western University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: Anthropology 2229F/G
• Professor: Christopher Ellis

Document Summary

Lecture 22 human skeletal remains and subsistence practice. You are what you eat: skeleton preserves record of your lifestyle/diet, bone chemistry. What you eat effects your bone chemistry: general health. People with well rounded diets were more healthy. Large population requires more food: pathologies. Poor diet makes it more difficult to fight disease. Bone chemistry: varies due to diet, introduced in the 1980s, huge industry today, can use animal remains as proxies for human diet, isotopic analysis: stable carbon isotopes. Ratio of c13-c12 to find out what the diet was like. Sometimes carbon-14 is preferred by some plants.