Funding: Natural Science Division grants, Colorado College.
I recently took part on a project that used chemical signatures from teeth and bone of the Alpine Iceman (Otzi) to try and determine his birthplace and movements during his life (Muller et al., 2004). This type of research – determining the provenance of an individual or population of humans – is possible because of the same carbon and oxygen isotope variations discussed in the Dinosaur research project section, only here we were able to increase the number of geochemical tracers by including the analysis of trace and radiogenic elements. Using these methods, my co-authors and I concluded that the Iceman was born and raised in Italy, and we may have even identified his home village!
At the present time, I am beginning a new project with Christina Torres-Rouff who is in the Anthropology Department here at Colorado College. Based on the physical analysis of artifacts and skeletal remains from Chile, Christina thinks that a pre-existing arid, low elevation populations of humans may have interacted with human groups that originated from the nearby highlands of Peru. Because plants and water from low and high elevation regions should have very different isotope ratios, we hope to test Christina’s hypothesis by analyzing carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen isotope ratios of human skeletal material from low elevation cemetaries. Stay tuned to see what we find! |
