The Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition in Portugal: Isotopic and Dental Evidence of Diet

Palaeodiets of Humans and Fauna at the Spanish Mesolithic Site of El Collado

“…What is clear from these data, however, is that despite the fact that the site is a shell midden, marine foods were not the dominant dietary protein sources at this site. The isotopic values are significantly less enriched than those of Late Mesolithic humans from Denmark and the UK but have affinities with the values from estuarine sites in Portugal (Lubell et al 1994).…”

“…Among the earliest published applications of bone collagen carbon isotope ratios in archaeology was that of Tauber (1981), which showed a great reliance on marine foods by late Mesolithic humans in Denmark. Subsequent isotopic studies of other Mesolithic humans in Denmark (Tauber 1983(Tauber , 1986Richards, Price, and Koch 2003) in other areas of Atlantic Europe such as the UK (Richards and Mellars 1998;Richards 2002a, 2002b), Portugal (Lubell et al 1994), and France (Schulting and Richards 2001), and in the Baltic (Lidén 1995) also found significant use of marine foods by coastal Late Mesolithic peoples. Most of these studies have focused on northern Europe, perhaps because there are very few Mesolithic human remains from southern Europe and collagen preservation is generally poor in the warmer southern regions of Europe.…”

Using dental and activity indicators in order to explore possible sex differences in an adult rural medieval population from Thebes (Greece)

“…Contrary to caries rates, the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists was accompanied with an important decline in tooth wear rates (e.g. Anderson 1965;Molnar 1971;Hinton 1981;Kennedy 1984;Pastor 1992;Lubell et al 1994), as populations that underwent agricultural intensification started to consume softer food items, resulting in reduced wear rates. However, apart from the reduction of wear rates, the onset of agriculture also brought the differentiation of wear patterns.…”

Climate change and population dynamics during the late Mesolithic and the Neolithic transition in Iberia

“…For the former period, a higher number of small or medium size shell middens have been documented at different coastal locations in the Algarve, Alemtejo and Estremadura regions, while the Late Mesolithic witnessed habitat concentration around the main estuaries, with a significant increase in shell midden size. A lower degree of residential mobility, with mostly round year occupation, is reflected by the documentation of necropolises on the shell middens, and a higher dependence on aquatic resources, estimated at around the 40%-50% of the diet on the basis of the stable isotopic evidence (Lubell et al 1994). In this sense, a strong chronological correlation between Lower Tagus estuarine adaptations and the beginning of the 8200 calBP event can be established if isotopic corrected human bone samples are considered on the basis of the local determination of the reservoir effect at the Muge region (Martins et al 2008.83) 4 .…”

“…Although this kind of approach can be traced back to the mid-90's in Portugal (Lubell et al 1994), fresh evidence from another Iberian regions such as Cantabria and the Central Mediterranean have recently been published ( Arias 2005Arias / 2006García Guixé et al 2006), providing a first data set to compare Late Mesolithic subsistence patterns on a broader scale (Tab. 2).…”