9409384 Price With support from the National Science Foundation Dr. Price and his colleagues will examine the usefulness of barium as a paleodietary indicator. Considerable research done focussing on strontium has shown that it is discriminated against relative to calcium in biological systems. Therefore relatively less strontium is present in herbivores which eat plants than in the plants themselves. Likewise bones of carnivores contain less strontium than do bones of their herbivore prey. Preliminary analyses conducted by Dr. Price and colleagues indicate that the same holds true for barium and that in this latter case the differences between trophic level are even more pronounced. Relatively little is known however about how barium moves through ecological systems and preliminary data again indicate that the patterning is complex. Marine, arid and non-arid terrestrial systems all seem to act differently. To gain insight into this issue, Dr. Price and colleagues will study how barium moves through several ecosystems. He will examine the food webs in selected regions of the Alaskan coastline, Alaskan interior, US Great Basin desert and the Guatemalan tropics. He will also analyze human prehistoric skeletal materials from many regions of the world. Because food is essential to human existence and subsistence and social systems of necessity are built around this need, archaeologists pay a great deal of attention to the reconstruction of prehistoric diet. This has proven extremely difficult because various classes of food are differentially preserved in archaeological sites. Plants for example which formed an essential part of prehistoric diet are rarely preserved. Chemical analysis of bone has proven extremely useful since different diets may leave telltale chemical fingerprints in skeletal remains. The proposed work by Dr. Price and colleagues will help to develop a new technique which may yield insight not only into diet but paleoclimate as well. This wo rk is important because the technique, when developed will provide a useful way to address a number of archaeological questions in many parts of the world.
