Monica Tromp

• AS, BA, MSc, PhD
• Research Associate at University of Otago

Human dental calculus is an excellent target for examining the plant component of ancient diets. Microfossils become imbedded within dental calculus throughout life, providing an overall picture of plant foods available (at least those that produce recoverable microfossils). Here we evaluate previous phytolith results (Dudgeon and Tromp, 2012) by e...

The drupe of Corynocarpus laevigatus was an important source of storable starch and carbohydrate for Maori and Moriori. However direct evidence of the drupe in archaeological sites is rare. In this review paper we look at the archaeological visibility of C. laevigatus, presenting data on how and where it might be encountered in archaeological conte...

During the European Middle Ages, the opening of long-distance Asian trade routes introduced exotic goods, including ultramarine, a brilliant blue pigment produced from lapis lazuli stone mined only in Afghanistan. Rare and as expensive as gold, this pigment transformed the European color palette, but little is known about its early trade or use. He...

Remote Oceania, which largely consists of islands covered in tropical forests, was the last region on earth to be successfully colonized by humans, beginning 3,000 years ago. We examined human dental calculus from burials in an ancient Lapita culture cemetery to gain insight into the early settlement of this previously untouched tropical environmen...

Oceania is a key region for studying human dispersals, adaptations and interactions with other hominin populations. Although archaeological evidence now reveals occupation of the region by approximately 65–45 000 years ago, its human fossil record, which has the best potential to provide direct insights into ecological adaptations and population re...

Human activities have significantly altered coastal ecosystems worldwide. The phenomenon of shifting baselines syndrome (SBS) complicates our understanding of these changes, masking the true scale of human impacts. This study investigates the long-term ecological effects of anthropogenic activities on New Zealand's coastal ecosystems over 800 years...

The Pacific islands and Island Southeast Asia have experienced multiple waves of human migrations, providing a case study for exploring the potential of ancient microbiomes to study human migration. We perform a metagenomic study of archaeological dental calculus from 102 individuals, originating from 10 Pacific islands and 1 island in Island South...

The dynamics of our species’ dispersal into the Pacific remains intensely debated. The authors present archaeological investigations in the Raja Ampat Islands, north-west of New Guinea, that provide the earliest known evidence for humans arriving in the Pacific more than 55 000–50 000 years ago. Seafaring simulations demonstrate that a northern equ...

Background: Archaeobotanists and palaeoecologists extensively use geometric morphometrics to identify plant opal phytoliths. Particularly when applied to assemblages of phytoliths from concentrations retrieved from closed contexts, morphometric data from archaeological phytoliths compared with similar data from reference material may allow taxonomi...

This Zenodo repository contains supporting information for the paper "Inter- and intra-observer variation in phytolith morphometry" by Welmoed A. Out, Rand Evett, Kristýna Hošková, Robert C. Power, Javier Ruiz-Pérez, Monica Tromp, Luc Vrydaghs, Kali Wade and Mario Hasler, published online in Annals of Botany, 2024 (link to paper behind paywall: htt...

The Pacific islands have experienced multiple waves of human migrations, providing a case study for exploring the potential of using the microbiome to study human migration. We performed a metagenomic study of archaeological dental calculus from 103 ancient individuals, originating from 12 Pacific islands and spanning a time range of ∼3000 years. O...

Conference abstract: Morphometry is increasingly used in phytolith analysis. It is regularly applied to distinguish between phytoliths from closely related taxa, particularly to differentiate and identify crop plants, but also to study grass paleoecology and evolution, for example. Open source morphometric software based on drawing masks of phytoli...

Presentation of an small ongoing project carried out under auspices of the International Committee for Phytolith Morphometrics (ICPM). The project is supported by the Hugo de Vries fund, the Netherlands, and Moesgaard Museum.

In this paper we review the growing evidence of anthropogenic landscapespresent in the semi-deciduous neotropical forest biomes of eastern NW Argentina,which have remained relatively neglected in favour of arid to semiarid western Andean regions. The evidence gathered in de El Alto-Ancasti provides animportant case study where multidisciplinary met...

Objectives Con Co Ngua is a complex, sedentary forager site from northern Vietnam dating to the early seventh millennium BP. Prior research identified a calcified Echinococcus granulosis cyst, which causes hydatid disease. Osteolytic lesions consistent with hydatid disease were also present in this individual and others. Hydatid disease is observed...

The histological identification of interglobular dentine (IGD) in archeological human remains with macroscopic evidence of rickets has opened a promising new avenue for the investigation of metabolic disease in the past. Recent paleopathological studies have shown that histological analysis of archeological human teeth may allow the identification...

New Guinea was host to some of the most complex maritime interaction networks in the tropics. We take a multi-proxy approach to investigate the foodways at the heart of the extensive Madang exchange network in the last millennium before the present: 1) invertebrate zooarchaeological analysis identifies the dependence on shellfish collecting from th...

Food and diet were class markers in 19th-century Ireland, which became evident as nearly 1 million people, primarily the poor and destitute, died as a consequence of the notorious Great Famine of 1845 to 1852. Famine took hold after a blight (Phytophthora infestans) destroyed virtually the only means of subsistence—the potato crop—for a significant...

The aim of this paper is to test the hypothesis that healed traumatic injuries in the pre-Neolithic assemblage of Con Co Ngua, northern Vietnam (c. 6800–6200 cal BP) are consistent with large wild animal interactions prior to their domestication. The core sample included 110 adult (aged ≥ 18 years) individuals, while comparisons are made with an ad...

Objectives Stable isotope ratio analysis of bulk bone collagen dominates research into past diet; however, bone carbonate and compound specific isotope analyses (CSIA) of amino acids provide alternative, yet complementary, lines of evidence toward that same research goal. Together they inform on different aspects of diet, allowing greater certainty...

Large, 'complex' pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer communities thrived in southern China and northern Vietnam, contemporaneous with the expansion of farming. Research at Con Co Ngua in Vietnam suggests that such huntergatherer populations shared characteristics with early farming communities: high disease loads, pottery, complex mortuary practices and...

Significance The domestication of horses and adoption of horse riding were critical processes that culminated in the emergence of mounted warriors and nomadic empires that shaped world history. The constraints of horse biology and riding equipment meant that equine veterinary care, particularly of teeth, was a core component of the success of the h...

p>Biological anthropological research, the study of both modern and past humans, is a burgeoning field in the Indo-Pacific region. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the unique environments of the Indo-Pacific have resulted in an archaeological record that does not necessarily align with those in the northern hemisphere. New, regionally-spec...

Dental calculus studies, though becoming more common for addressing a range of archaeological questions, are still in their infancy. Dental calculus is a mineralised biofilm that forms on the surface of teeth, with the potential to encase anything that comes into contact with the mouth. Dental calculus has provided information on the lifeways of pa...

Sites which have been occupied semi-continuously in the past present some inherent difficulties for archaeology. Here we present new research from a coastal site on the North Island of New Zealand at Cooks Beach where anthropogenic vegetation changes are seen using microfossil analysis of obsidian tools, sediments and pit fill. The results indicate...

In this chapter, we develop a method employing combined SEM-EDS and LA-ICP-MS analysis of mineralized tissue (bone apatite) to quantify trace element concentrations. We apply this method to bone and tooth samples from the Kammenyi Ambar 5 cemetery (Russia) to determine whether a trace element signal resulting from working of Arsenical Bronze can be...

Analysis of prehistoric copper and bronze in the Caucasus was performed previously on thousands of objects with arc optical emission spectroscopy (OES). While arc OES is no longer widely used in archaeometry, LA-ICP-MS has shown great promise for isotopic and chemical analysis of ancient copper and bronze artifacts. In order to explore the effectiv...

Morphometric analysis (measurements of size and shape) has become a significant research tool in phytolith studies. The International Phytolith Society (IPS) appointed the International Committee for Phytolith Morphometrics (ICPM) to establish methodological standards for the discipline. This paper presents current recommendations of the ICPM. It d...

Disseminating what is currently known about the skeletal biology of the ancient Rapanui and placing it within the wider context of Polynesian skeletal variation, this volume is the culmination of over thirty years of research into the remotely inhabited Easter Island. Compiling osteological data deriving from Rapanui skeletal remains into one succi...

Phytoliths and starch grains are usual suspects in dietary analysis of archaeological samples, but there is little discussion of the potential for secondary incorporation of extrinsic microfossils into plant tissues during growth that might then be found in dental calculus. This mechanism is particularly important when smooth-skinned tubers (such a...

Microfossil analysis of human dental calculus provides consumption-specific and archaeologically relevant data for evaluating diet and subsistence in past populations. Calculus was extracted from 114 teeth representing 104 unique individuals from a late 16(th) to early 18(th) century skeletal series on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to address questions...

Note: This was a presentation of preliminary data. The authors are preparing a publication for the end of the year. The idea of a Lapita subsistence economy that included commensal species such as pigs, dogs, chickens and rats has been reasonably well established in Pacific archaeology through zooarchaeological analyses. Plant foods have also been...

Previously, analysis of prehistoric copper and bronze in the Caucasus was performed with arc optical emission spectroscopy (OES). While arc OES is no longer widely used in archaeometry, both energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) have shown great promise for chemical analysis...

Microfossil analysis of human dental calculus and sediment samples to address questions of human and human-environment interactions using 114 teeth from 13 burial sites on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), dated between the late 17th to early 19th century, and 15 sediment samples from five sites. The majority of recovered microfossils from the calculus wer...