Stable Isotope Sourcing of Wool from Textiles at Pacatnamú

Abstract

Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic compositions were determined for wool textiles from the Lambayeque (c. AD 1100-1320) occupation at Pacatnamú in the Jequetepeque Valley, northern Peru. The isotopic data demonstrate that the wool was not obtained via long-distance exchange with the highlands and was most probably derived from locally raised camelids. In light of other lines of evidence (diversity of dyes used to produce the same colours in textiles and the low quality of the weaving), textiles at Pacatnamú appear not to have been as effective a marker of political power and prestige for local elites as they were elsewhere in the Andean region.

New Bioarchaeological Evidence and Radiocarbon Dates from the Lambayeque/Sicán Culture Camelids from the El Brujo Complex (Northern Coast of Peru): Implications for Funerary and Herd Management Practices

“…In order to estimate proportion of C 3 to C 4 in the Huaca Cao Viejo camelids' diet, the δ 13 C values of collagen were analysed using Bayesian mixing modelling in SIAR (Parnell et al 2010). A diet-collagen fractionation of +3.7 ± 1.6‰ and a diet-hair keratin fractionation of +2.4 ± 1.2‰ were used for estimating C 3 /C 4 contributions (Szpak et al 2014(Szpak et al , 2018. Mean values for δ 13 C in C 3 (−26.01 ± 1.75) and C 4 (−12.01 ± 0.95‰) plants were obtained from the (Jackson et al 2011) and its function on standard bivariate ellipse area metrics were used for evaluating the variation in isotopic composition for bone collagen and hair keratin, at a confidence level of 40%.…”

“…Most of these studies have focused on the Early Intermediate Period (EIP; 200 BC-AD 800) and Middle Horizon (MH; AD 600-1000) of northern Peru. There is a relative lack of research using stable isotope analysis (SIA) for the Late Intermediate Period (LIP; AD 1000-1470) in general and in the Lambayeque/Sicán culture (hereafter called the Lambayeque culture) in particular, with two studies on camelid remains and textiles from Pacatnamú, in the Jequetepeque valley (Szpak et al 2018;Verano and DeNiro 1993), and two studies on human remains, from Pacatnamú (White et al 2009) and from Huaca Loro (Knudson 2014), published so far. The majority of the archaeological investigations into this culture concentrate on the Lambayeque valley (Fernández Alvarado and Wester La Torre 2014;Shimada 1981Shimada , 1995Shimada , 2014a; Wester La Torre 2016, among others), and there are few studies outside this valley (Franco Jordán, Gálvez Mora, and Vásquez Sánchez 2007;Gálvez Mora 2005, 2014;Prieto Burmester 2014).…”

Camelid husbandry in the Atacama Desert? A stable isotope study of camelid bone collagen and textiles from the Lluta and Camarones Valleys, northern Chile

“…Shimada and Shimada [30] summarized other lines of evidence, which are also consistent with the raising of camelids on the north coast of Peru since at least the Middle Horizon (c. AD 600). Isotopic data indicate that meat and fiber was derived from local animals [26,31,32]. This finding runs counter to the widely-held assumption that the fiber in textiles found at low elevation sites must have originated in the highlands [19,33], although in some cases (i.e., Chancay, central Peruvian coast, Late Intermediate Period) the fiber was exclusively imported from the highlands [31].…”

“…Some isotope systems, such as hydrogen, oxygen, strontium, and lead, record the location in which an animal lived [54], and these techniques have been applied with some regularity in archaeological contexts to address the trade in animal products [55][56][57][58][59]. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope compositions are not tied to geography in the same way as these other isotope systems, but in certain regions where environmental variation is large over relatively small spatial scales or particular feeding practices that are isotopically unique exist, carbon and nitrogen isotopes can be an effective means of assessing the locality of animals and animal products in the archaeological record [31,32,60].…”

“…Relationship between isotopic and elemental composition of camelid fiber textiles. Carbon and nitrogen isotopic compositions of textiles analyzed in this study, as well as other camelid fiber samples from previously published papers[26,31,32]. Samples are colored according to their atomic C:N ratio.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228332.g002…”