Stable Isotopes and Archaeology in Southern South America. Hunter-Gatherers, Pastoralism and Agriculture: An Introduction

The introduction of stable isotopes in archaeological research beginning in the 1970s produced a revolution in the ways that several key anthropological issues were studied, including early hominin subsistence, hunter-gatherer spatial organisation, origins and history of farming and pastoralist societies, migrations, and intraand inter-group social differentiation. As a tool suited for the quantitative reconstruction of palaeodiets, bone chemistry provided a new and independent line of evidence that was readily integrated into ongoing discussions based on archaeofaunal and palaeobotanical data (see van der Merwe, 1982; Ambrose, 1993). The impact that isotopic research has had in the field of archaeology is reflected in the ever-growing number of publications making use of isotopic analyses, and in the also growing number of volumes directed towards the integration of available results and perspectives of analysis (Sillen & Armelagos, 1991; Sandford, 1993; Bocherens et al., 1999; Ambrose & Katzenberg, 2000; Ambrose & Krigbaum, 2003; Koch & Burton, 2003; Staller et al., 2006).