Emma Lightfoot

• PhD Cantab
• Research Associate at University of Cambridge

Oxygen isotope analysis of archaeological skeletal remains is an increasingly popular tool to study past human migrations. It is based on the assumption that human body chemistry preserves the δ18O of precipitation in such a way as to be a useful technique for identifying migrants and, potentially, their homelands. In this study, the first such glo...

RATIONALE: Isotopic palaeodietary studies generally focus on bone collagen from human and/or animal remains. While plant remains are rarely analysed, it is known that plant isotope values can vary as a result of numerous factors, including soil conditions, the environment and type of plant. The millets were important food crops in prehistoric Euras...

The spread of agriculture is an important topic of archaeological research, but relatively few studies address the drivers behind the spread of specific species empirically. Here we use published isotopic data to consider whether the millets spread from their putative domestication centre in the East to western Eurasia for use as a staple food. We...

Patterns of water consumption by past human populations are rarely considered, yet drinking behavior is socially mediated and access to water sources is often socially controlled. Oxygen isotope analysis of archeological human remains is commonly used to identify migrants in the archeological record, but it can also be used to consider water itself...

Food is well-known to encode social and cultural values, for example different social groups use different consumption patterns to act as social boundaries. When societies and cultures change, whether through drift, through population replacement or other factors, diet may also alter despite unchanging resource availability within a region. This st...

Movement of resources was essential to the survival and success of early complex societies. The sources and destinations of goods and the means of transportation – be it by boats, carts and/or foot – can often be inferred, but the logistics of these movements are inherently more difficult to ascertain. Here, we use strontium isotopic analysis to te...

The movements of ancient crop and animal domesticates across prehistoric Eurasia are well-documented in the archaeological record. What is less well understood are the precise mechanisms that farmers and herders employed to incorporate newly introduced domesticates into their long-standing husbandry and culinary traditions. This paper presents stab...

We present stable isotope and osteological data from human remains at Paloma, Chilca I, La Yerba III, and Morro I that offer new evidence for diet, lifestyle, and habitual mobility in the first villages that proliferated along the arid Pacific coast of South America (ca. 6000 cal BP). The data not only reaffirm the dietary primacy of marine protein...

During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Spanish ships sailed around the globe connecting Spain to its colonies. While documentary records offer rich details concerning life on board ship, archaeological information is essential to generating a full picture of the past. The cemetery at Old St Bernard’s Hospital, Gibraltar, provides an opportun...

This paper presents new radiocarbon dates and the results of the first archaeobotanical investigations at Eneolithic Botai site, for the first time aiming to explore the plant food component in the diet of Botai population and if the inhabitants of the Botai were a part of an early crop food exchange network. Our excavation of a hut circle and asso...

The essays in this volume honour a man whose research over the last four decades has exemplified the potential of archaeology, archaeological science and their cognate disciplines to address central questions about food and human nature. The volume comprises 17 thematic papers, all focused on the archaeology of food and arranged into three sections...

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming involved profound cultural and technological changes. In Western and Central Europe, these changes occurred rapidly and synchronously after the arrival of early farmers of Anatolian origin [1; 2 ; 3], who largely replaced the local Mesolithic hunter-gatherers [1; 4; 5 ; 6]. Further east, in the B...

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming involved profound cultural and technological changes. In Western and Central Europe, these changes occurred rapidly and synchronously after the arrival of early farmers of Anatolian origin [1, 2, 3], who largely replaced the local Mesolithic hunter-gatherers [1, 4, 5, 6]. Further east, in the Bal...

This article explores grain crop movement across prehistoric Eurasia. It draws on evidence from archaeobotany, stable isotope studies, and archaeogenetics to date and map the process of food globalisation, and relate it to human consumption, culinary practice and crop ecology. It reviews the findings of a project funded by the European Research Cou...

The Neolithic transition was a dynamic time in European prehistory of cultural, social, and technological change. Although this period has been well explored in central Europe using ancient nuclear DNA [1, 2], its genetic impact on northern and eastern parts of this continent has not been as extensively studied. To broaden our understanding of the...

This article explores grain crop movement across prehistoric Eurasia. It draws on evidence from archaeobotany, stable isotope studies, and archaeogenetics to date and map the process of food globalisation, and relate it to human consumption, culinary practice and crop ecology. It reviews the findings of a project funded by the European Research Cou...

Food encodes social and cultural values and has an important role to play in defining identities. In mixed populations, diet can be used to distinguish between ?us? and ?them?. This study investigates the extent to which the inhabitants of Mediaeval Tallinn, an important trading centre, used food to maintain distinct identities. Human skeletal mate...

Recent research has demonstrated that a series of mountains from the eastern Iranian Plateau to eastern Kazakhstan and to western China played a significant role in trans-Eurasian exchange during the third and second millennia BC. In close association with these mountain corridors, a number of southwestern Asian cereals, notably free threshing whea...

Objectives: The Canary Islands are considered one of the first places where Atlantic slave plantations with labourers of African origin were established, during the 15th century AD. In Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), a unique cemetery dated to the 15th and 17th centuries was discovered adjacent to an ancient sugar plantation with funerary pr...

This article explores the context of the long-distance translocation of crops in prehistory. We draw upon contrasts in the isotopic signatures of Southwest Asian crops, including wheat and barley – C3 plants, compared to Asian millets – C4 plants, to investigate a key region of trans-Eurasian exchange, the Chinese province of Gansu. The isotopic re...

Steppe communities have traditionally been viewed as pastoralist groups with similar herd-based economies. Recent scholarship, however, warns against assumptions of homogeneity and new scientific techniques are providing a more nuanced approach to steppe archaeology, with increasing indications of diversity. This recent evidence further suggests th...

The Bronze and Iron Ages were times of social change throughout Europe, with the development of hillforts and monumental architecture, technological advances and increases in economic specialization and social hierarchy. The extent to which these developments were concurrent with changes in subsistence practices, particularly in the Balkans, is les...

Intercontinental exchanges between communities living in different parts of Eurasia during the late prehistoric period have become increasingly popular as a topic of archaeological research. The Qijia culture, found in northwest China, is one of the key archaeological cultures that can shed light on trans-Eurasian exchange because a variety of impo...

During the second millennium bc, several significant changes were happening in prehistoric societies across Eurasia. For instance, shifts in subsistence practice occurred in north-western China, including the western Loess Plateau. However, the magnitude and nature of this dietary change are unclear and more detailed information and regional studie...

The formal Iron Age cemetery at Suddern Farm, located near Danebury hillfort, provides a unique opportunity to investigate whether differences in burial tradition and ritual behaviour seen at the two sites are linked to access to food resources during life. We measured the carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios of 40 humans from Suddern Farm and compa...

Stevens et al. (Oxford J Archaeol 29: 407–428, 2010) speculated that the extensive faunal intra-population isotopic variability at Danebury hillfort was due to the animals being husbanded within various ecological isozones (i.e. microenvironments with distinct natural or anthropogenic isotopic baselines) within the Danebury Environs, and subsequent...

Through isotopic investigations of directly dated human remains recovered from the Eton College Rowing Course, we examine changes in diet from the Neolithic to the Roman period. The human isotope signatures point to a diet based on C3 terrestrial resources. A significant correlation is visible between human δ13C values and time, but no such trend i...

Palaeodietary studies typically focus on the analysis of bone collagen due to the limited availability of plant remains. Isotopic analysis of plant remains, however, allow for a more extensive consideration of the contribution of plants to the human diet and can potentially provide information about the environment in which the crops were grown. Th...

Plant sources of starch have been domesticated in several parts of the world. By the second millennium bc in various parts of Eurasia, such starchy crops are encountered, not only around their geographical regions of origin, but also at considerable distances from them. Drawing on evidence from across Eurasia, this paper explores this episode of fo...

Modern Mauritius was born in the early eighteenth century when a group of French colonists named it Île-de-France. The island has seen waves of colonial intervention both previously and subsequently, resulting in a contemporary population that is diverse and a past that is highly turbulent and infinitely interesting. The archaeological potential th...

The generalised picture of Mesolithic marine diet giving way to a Neolithic terrestrial diet, as derived from isotope measurements, has been both championed and challenged in this journal. Here new results from the Balkans offer a preliminary picture of a diversity of food strategy, both before and after the great transition.

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Carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses were performed on human and animal bones recovered from pits within Danebury Iron Age hillfort. All results are within the range expected for European Holocene specimens and are similar to those from other Iron Age sites in central southern Britain. Our results indicate that the human diet included a significant...

This paper reports the results of stable isotopic analyses conducted upon animal and human bones recovered from Yarnton, Oxfordshire. Spanning the Neolithic to Saxon periods, it is in many ways a typical site, but is unusual in that a small Middle Iron Age cemetery was discovered. All of the data presented here lie within the expected isotopic rang...