A matter of months: High precision migration chronology of a Bronze Age female

Abstract

Establishing the age at which prehistoric individuals move away from their childhood residential location holds crucial information about the socio dynamics and mobility patterns in ancient societies. We present a novel combination of strontium isotope analyses performed on the over 3000 year old “Skrydstrup Woman” from Denmark, for whom we compiled a highly detailed month-scale model of her migration timeline. When combined with physical anthropological analyses this timeline can be related to the chronological age at which the residential location changed. We conducted a series of high-resolution strontium isotope analyses of hard and soft human tissues and combined these with anthropological investigations including CT-scanning and 3D visualizations. The Skrydstrup Woman lived during a pan-European period characterized by technical innovation and great social transformations stimulated by long-distance connections; consequently she represents an important part of both Danish and European prehistory. Our multidisciplinary study involves complementary biochemical, biomolecular and microscopy analyses of her scalp hair. Our results reveal that the Skrydstrup Woman was between 17–18 years old when she died, and that she moved from her place of origin -outside present day Denmark- to the Skrydstrup area in Denmark 47 to 42 months before she died. Hence, she was between 13 to 14 years old when she migrated to and resided in the area around Skrydstrup for the rest of her life. From an archaeological standpoint, this one-time and one-way movement of an elite female during the possible “age of marriageability” might suggest that she migrated with the aim of establishing an alliance between chiefdoms. Consequently, this detailed multidisciplinary investigation provides a novel tool to reconstruct high resolution chronology of individual mobility with the perspective of studying complex patterns of social and economic interaction in prehistory.

Strontium isotope ratios of human hair from the United States: Patterns and aberrations

“…As an example, Font and colleagues found endogenous Sr to be the most significant contributor to the geospatial signal encoded in the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr of hair, while several other studies conversely found strong relationships between exogenous sources and the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr of hair . Therefore, separating the factors contributing to the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr of hair is paramount for utilizing this analytical tool in anthropologic studies …”

“…11,47,50 Therefore, separating the factors contributing to the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr of hair is paramount for utilizing this analytical tool in anthropologic studies. 5,6 Comparing the 87 Here, we suggest that the difference in the 87 As our goal in this study was to assess the capacity of the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratio of hair to record geographic information, it is important to identify and remove suspected "travelers" from the dataset. To identify suspected "travelers" we excluded leached hair and leachate pairs with a difference in their 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratios greater than 0.00034 (Δ Hair-Leach ) (Figure 3).…”

“…Numerous studies have observed relationships between the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratio of hair and possible exogenous sources of Sr in the environment (e.g., 5,11,47,50,51,54,63 ). Recently, a significant relationship between the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratios of hair and tap water was observed within a single city that had municipal water with several distinct ratios.…”

“…Reconstructing the provenance of an individual is important to many anthropologic and forensic investigations . Stable isotope ratios recorded in human scalp hair have utility in reconstruction of the movement histories of individuals . This is because hair keratin and its isotopic signatures are recorders of an individual's environment .…”

“…[1][2][3][4] Stable isotope ratios recorded in human scalp hair have utility in reconstruction of the movement histories of individuals. [5][6][7][8][9] This is because hair keratin and its isotopic signatures are recorders of an individual's environment. 10 The applications of isotope analysis of hair are far-reaching considering the common occurrence of human hair at archeological sites and crime scenes.…”