https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

The influence of diet on the distribution of nitrogen isotopes in animals was investigated by analyzing animals grown in the laboratory on diets of constant nitrogen isotopic composition. 
The isotopic composition of the nitrogen in an animal reflects the nitrogen isotopic composition of its diet. The δ^(15)N values of the whole bodies of animals are usually more positive than those of their diets. Different individuals of a species raised on the same diet can have significantly different δ^(15)N values. The variability of the relationship between the δ^(15)N values of animals and their diets is greater for different species raised on the same diet than for the same species raised on different diets. Different tissues of mice are also enriched in ^(15)N relative to the diet, with the difference between the δ^(15)N values of a tissue and the diet depending on both the kind of tissue and the diet involved. The δ^(15)N values of collagen and chitin, biochemical components that are often preserved in fossil animal remains, are also related to the δ^(15)N value of the diet. 
The dependence of the δ^(15)N values of whole animals and their tissues and biochemical components on the δ^(15)N value of diet indicates that the isotopic composition of animal nitrogen can be used to obtain information about an animal's diet if its potential food sources had different δ^(15)N values. The nitrogen isotopic method of dietary analysis probably can be used to estimate the relative use of legumes vs non-legumes or of aquatic vs terrestrial organisms as food sources for extant and fossil animals. However, the method probably will not be applicable in those modern ecosystems in which the use of chemical fertilizers has influenced the distribution of nitrogen isotopes in food sources. 
The isotopic method of dietary analysis was used to reconstruct changes in the diet of the human population that occupied the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico over a 7000 yr span. Variations in the δ^(15)C and δ^(15)N values of bone collagen suggest that C_4 and/or CAM plants (presumably mostly corn) and legumes (presumably mostly beans) were introduced into the diet much earlier than suggested by conventional archaeological analysis.

Influence of Diet On the Distribtion of Nitrogen Isotopes in Animals

Following its initial arrival in SE Europe 8,500 years ago agriculture spread throughout the continent, changing food production and consumption patterns and increasing population densities. Here we show that, in contrast to the steady population growth usually assumed, the introduction of agriculture into Europe was followed by a boom-and-bust pattern in the density of regional populations. We demonstrate that summed calibrated radiocarbon date distributions and simulation can be used to test the significance of these demographic booms and busts in the context of uncertainty in the radiocarbon date calibration curve and archaeological sampling. We report these results for Central and Northwest Europe between 8,000 and 4,000 cal. BP and investigate the relationship between these patterns and climate. However, we find no evidence to support a relationship. Our results thus suggest that the demographic patterns may have arisen from endogenous causes, although this remains speculative.

/pdf/regional-population-collapse-followed-initial-agriculture-2nzkfefumq.pdf

Regional population collapse followed initial agriculture booms in mid-Holocene Europe

This volume is a collection of the most important essays written by Franz Boas on the science of anthropology. \"Franz Boas is the father of American anthropology and one of the founders of the field of modern anthropology. The book, \"Race, Language, and Culture,\" is a collection of some of his most important essays.\"-David Schneider, University of Chicago \"An exceptional book. Exceptional because it brings into one volume sixty-two papers written by the most influential figure in American anthropology. . . . Exceptional in that it exhibits the wide range of interests and scientific exactness which made it possible for one man to exert such a profound influence on the growing science of anthropology. . . . This is a volume every student of anthropology will wish to possess; it will also have a wide distribution among other students of the social sciences, and all interested in the problems of race.\"-Fay-Cooper Cole, \"American Anthropologist\

Race, Language and Culture.

States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China

New human aDNA studies have once again brought to the forefront the role of mobility and migration in shaping social phenomena in European prehistory, processes that recent theoretical frameworks in archaeology have downplayed as an outdated explanatory notion linked to traditional culture history. While these new genetic data have provided new insights into the population history of prehistoric Europe, they are frequently interpreted and presented in a manner that recalls aspects of traditional culture-historical archaeology that were rightly criticized through the 1970s to the 1990s. They include the idea that shared material culture indicates shared participation in the same social group, or culture, and that these cultures constitute one-dimensional, homogeneous, and clearly bounded social entities. Since the new aDNA data are used to create vivid narratives describing ‘massive migrations’, the so-called cultural groups are once again likened to human populations and in turn revitalized as external drivers for socio-cultural change. Here, I argue for a more nuanced consideration of molecular data that more explicitly incorporates anthropologically informed mobility and migration models.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/B225B14D82066373B2C11295AA1D1462/S1461957117000432a.pdf/div-class-title-massive-migrations-the-impact-of-recent-adna-studies-on-our-view-of-third-millennium-europe-div.pdf

Massive Migrations? The Impact of Recent aDNA Studies on our View of Third Millennium Europe

‘Corded Ware’ in central and eastern Europe is an archaeological phenomenon that has generated multiple ideas and myths about the origins of the Indo-European language, large scale migrations from the eastern Steppes and radical ideological turnovers after 3000 bc. These ideas have been fostered in large part by the over-emphasis placed by successive generations of archaeologists on its extraordinarily large geographical extent and on the seemingly uniform pattern of Corded Ware material culture. The traditional model is characterised by the presence of an early phase, the so-called A-horizon, showing pan-European unity in material culture, and a successive phase characterised by increasing regional variability. However, over the last 15 years, a number of new studies, especially those focusing on the rigorous radiocarbon dating of Corded Ware contexts, bring into question several of the fundamental aspects of this old model. New results strongly suggest that the different components of the Corded Ware A-horizon emerged in several different regions, and that the previously claimed cultural uniformity is instead due to the co-occurrence of some special elements, while regional variability stands out as being much more prominent than hitherto assumed throughout all Corded Ware phases. Here, a new interpretation built on the diversity and regional variability of material culture and burial practices is proposed, one that challenges the view of Corded Ware as an expression of a social totality. This new model argues that several interlinked networks facilitated the flow of new practices and symbols into very diverse regional settings. Rather than viewing the Corded Ware phenomenon as representing a singular identity, ideology, or tradition, it may be more appropriate to regard it as a set of symbols and practices that were selectively incorporated into, and transformed by, local societies; it is this which produced the diversity attested for in the archaeological record

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0079497X13000200

Upending a ‘Totality’: Re-evaluating Corded Ware Variability in Late Neolithic Europe

Since aDNA research suggested a marked gene influx from Eastern into Central Europe in the 3rd millennium bc, outdated, simplistic narratives of massive migrations of closed populations have re-appeared in archaeological discussions. A more sophisticated model of migration from the steppes was proposed recently by Kristiansen et al. As a reaction to that proposal, this paper aims to contribute to this ongoing debate by refining the latter model, better integrating archaeological data and anthropological knowledge. It is argued that a polythetic classification of the archaeological material in Central Europe in the 3rd millennium reveals the presence of a new complex of single grave burial rituals which transcends the traditional culture labels. Genetic steppe ancestry is mainly connected to this new kind of burials, rather than to Corded Ware or Bell Beaker materials. Here it is argued that a polythetic view on the archaeological record suggests more complicated histories of migration, population mixtures and interaction than assumed by earlier models, and ways to better integrate detailed studies of archaeological materials with a deeper exploration of anthropological models of mobility and social group composition and the molecular biological data are explored.

/pdf/re-integrating-archaeology-a-contribution-to-adna-studies-3z5e5ttq0m.pdf

Re-integrating Archaeology: A Contribution to aDNA Studies and the Migration Discourse on the 3rd Millennium BC in Europe

Political economy approaches have been criticized for their focus on top-down processes with insufficient attention to non-elite agency. Here, we expand archaeological applications of political economy by integrating a bottom-up perspective on the construction of social power, drawing mainly from collective action theory and anarchist theory. An array of interacting agents, diverse interests, and decentralized powers exists in non-state societies. Social segments with countervailing interests and strategies confront, limit, and co-opt elite power. These countervailing forces are fundamental to political economies in these societies, and focusing on them illustrates the ways in which social power and cooperation actually work as differing interests and objectives exist in perpetual tension. The significance of these bottom-up forces is illustrated with synthetic summaries of three historically independent, long-term archaeological sequences—Northwest Coast hunter-gatherer-fisher societies (case 1), Early Neolithic expansions into Europe (case 2), and the Island Southeast Asia and Pacific region (case 3). We draw together relevant theoretical threads to conceptualize how dialectical relationships exist among a diversity of social interests that stem from the material conditions that structure labor and resource flows.

/pdf/political-economy-in-the-archaeology-of-emergent-complexity-335r7sd4tp.pdf

Political Economy in the Archaeology of Emergent Complexity: a Synthesis of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches

In order to understand the dynamics of cultural phenomena, scientific dating in archaeology is an increasingly indispensable tool. Only by dating independently of typology is it possible to understand typological development itself (Muller 2004). Here radiometric dating methods, especially those based on carbon isotopy, still play the most important role. For evaluations exceeding the intra-site level, it is particularly important that such data is collected in large numbers and that the dates are easily accessible. Also, new statistical analyses, such as sequential calibration based on Bayesian methods, do not require single dates, but rather demand a greater number. By their combination significantly more elaborate results can be achieved compared to the results from conventional evaluation (e. g. Whittle et al. 2011).A second premise of RADON is that of „Open Access“. This approach continues to be applied in the international research community, which we welcome as a highly positive development. The radiocarbon database RADON has been committed to this principle for more than 12 years. In this database 14C data – primarily of the Neolithic of Central Europe and Southern Scandinavia – is collected and successively augmented.

/pdf/radon-radiocarbon-dates-online-2012-central-european-22sodvkpih.pdf

Martin Furholt

Papers

Massive Migrations? The Impact of Recent aDNA Studies on our View of Third Millennium Europe

Upending a ‘Totality’: Re-evaluating Corded Ware Variability in Late Neolithic Europe

Re-integrating Archaeology: A Contribution to aDNA Studies and the Migration Discourse on the 3rd Millennium BC in Europe

Political Economy in the Archaeology of Emergent Complexity: a Synthesis of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches

RADON - Radiocarbon dates online 2012. Central European database of 14C dates for the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age.