With National Science Foundation support Dr. Joseph Ezzo will conduct one season of field research in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia and analyze the samples he collects. As part of an international team of scientists he will conduct trace element analysis of human skeletal material derived from three distinct populations of foragers which occupied the region between 5,800 and 2,000 BC. Lake Baikal is the largest fresh water lake in the world and harbors a rich fish and mammalian fauna. Rivers which flow into it are likewise rich in edible resources. While people at a hunting and gathering level of subsistence organization have incorporated riverine and laucustrine items into their diets for thousands of years, it is unclear how important these items were. Some archaeologists believe they were abundant enough to constitute a reliable year round subsistence source which permitted fixed settlement while others believe they were not dependable enough to serve this purpose. Other than for recent time periods on the US and Canadian Northwest Coasts, surprisingly little is known about this prehistoric subsistence adaptation. Excavation by an international team in the Lake Baikal region has yielded a large variety of cultural remains which span three distinct groups. The researchers have also uncovered a number of human skeletons and these provide the subject of Dr. Ezzo's analysis. Dr. Ezzo will collect a small bone sample from each skeleton and conduct trace element analyses, focusing in particular on calcium, strontium and barium. Foods eaten leave a chemical imprint on bone and it is possible to work from bone itself back to diet. Such data provide unique insight. Archaeologists often recover animal bone and plant remains from prehistoric sites and use these materials for dietary reconstruction. Both classes of data however are subject to strong preservational bias and the validity of such results is questionable. Bone trace elements however are not subject to this limitation. To determine `ground truth` Dr. Ezzo will also collect soil, plant and animal materials from the region and analyze them at the University of Wisconsin Archaeological Chemistry laboratory. This research is important because it will use a relatively new technique to gain insight into past human subsistence adaptations. It will help to evaluate the significance of riverine and lake resources in human prehistory.
