E Lightfoot
Biographic Data
| ID | 21432 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E Lightfoot |
| GIVEN NAMES | E |
| FAMILY NAME | Lightfoot |
| SIGNATURE | LIGHTFOOT E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0823-4720 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 448 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Diet and Lifestyle in the First Villages of the Middle Preceramic
We present stable isotope and osteological data from human remains at Paloma, Chilca I, La Yerba III, and Morro I that offer new evidence for diet, lifestyle, and habitual mobility in the first villages that proliferated along the arid Pacific coast of South America (ca. 6000 cal BP). The data not only reaffirm the dietary primacy of marine protein for this period but also show evidence at Paloma of direct access interactions between the coast an…
Colonialism, slavery and ‘The Great Experiment’
Feeding the herds
Sea, sickness and cautionary tales
During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Spanish ships sailed around the globe connecting Spain to its colonies. While documentary records offer rich details concerning life on board ship, archaeological information is essential to generating a full picture of the past. The cemetery at Old St Bernard's Hospital, Gibraltar, provides an opportunity to study the skeletal remains of sailors. Following previous osteological research, carbon, nitr…
Heading for the hills? A multi-isotope study of sheep management in first-millennium BC Italy
Archaeobotanical investigations at the earliest horse herder site of Botai in Kazakhstan
Diet, sex, and social status in the Late Avar period
Diet often plays a vital role in defining social divisions within and between social groups and thus can be used to understand the social paradigms of archeological cultures. During the Early Avar period (568-630 A.D.), burial evidence indicates that there were strong demarcations of social stratification and divisions between sexes and age groups; however, the symbols of intra-population heterogeneity become increasingly rare during the Late Ava…
Handle with care
This article examines the relationship between literary and bioarchaeological approaches to slavery, and investigates how the methods and priorities of each discipline might inform each other in understanding what it was like to be enslaved. Both bioarchaeologists and creative writers have attempted to access the inner lives of enslaved people, yet there has been little interaction between them. This paper offers an account of a research project …
On the Use of Biomineral Oxygen Isotope Data to Identify Human Migrants in the Archaeological Record
Oxygen isotope analysis of archaeological skeletal remains is an increasingly popular tool to study past human migrations. It is based on the assumption that human body chemistry preserves the δ18O of precipitation in such a way as to be a useful technique for identifying migrants and, potentially, their homelands. In this study, the first such global survey, we draw on published human tooth enamel and bone bioapatite data to explore the validity…
Novel isotopic approaches to investigating human palaeoecology
Stable isotope analyses started being performed on archaeological materials more than 50 years ago, to the best of our knowledge, when geochemists such as Cesare Emiliani applied oxygen isotope ana
Radical change and dietary conservatism
Recent research has demonstrated that a series of mountains from the eastern Iranian Plateau to eastern Kazakhstan and to western China played a significant role in trans-Eurasian exchange during the third and second millennia BC. In close association with these mountain corridors, a number of southwestern Asian cereals, notably free threshing wheat and barley, moved eastward, and broomcorn millet, among other plant foods originating in China, mo…
The early colonial atlantic world
OBJECTIVES: The Canary Islands are considered one of the first places where Atlantic slave plantations with labourers of African origin were established, during the 15th century AD. In Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), a unique cemetery dated to the 15th and 17th centuries was discovered adjacent to an ancient sugar plantation with funerary practices that could be related to enslaved people. In this article, we investigate the origin and poss…
The extent of cereal cultivation among the Bronze Age to Turkic period societies of Kazakhstan determined using stable isotope analysis of bone collagen
How ‘Pastoral’ is Pastoralism? Dietary Diversity in B ronze A ge C ommunities in the Central K azakhstan Steppes
Steppe communities have traditionally been viewed as pastoralist groups with similar herd‐based economies. Recent scholarship, however, warns against assumptions of homogeneity and new scientific techniques are providing a more nuanced approach to steppe archaeology, with increasing indications of diversity. This recent evidence further suggests that considering these communities as primarily pastoralist may hide a variety of subsistence strategi…
Metals and millets
Stable Isotope Analysis of Human and Animal Remains at the Qijiaping Site in Middle Gansu, China
Intercontinental exchanges between communities living in different parts of Eurasia during the late prehistoric period have become increasingly popular as a topic of archaeological research. The Qijia culture, found in northwest China, is one of the key archaeological cultures that can shed light on trans-Eurasian exchange because a variety of imports are found in this cultural context. These imports include new cereals and animals, which suggest…
Stable Isotope Analysis of Human and Faunal Remains in the Western L oess P lateau, Approximately 2000 cal bc
During the second millennium bc , several significant changes were happening in prehistoric societies across E urasia. For instance, shifts in subsistence practice occurred in north‐western C hina, including the western L oess P lateau. However, the magnitude and nature of this dietary change are unclear and more detailed information and regional studies are needed in order to fully understand the reasons behind this change. In this study, palaeo…
Water consumption in Iron Age, Roman, and Early Medieval Croatia
Patterns of water consumption by past human populations are rarely considered, yet drinking behavior is socially mediated and access to water sources is often socially controlled. Oxygen isotope analysis of archeological human remains is commonly used to identify migrants in the archeological record, but it can also be used to consider water itself, as this technique documents water consumption rather than migration directly. Here, we report an o…
From necessity to choice
This article explores the context of the long-distance translocation of crops in prehistory. We draw upon contrasts in the isotopic signatures of Southwest Asian crops, including wheat and barley – C3 plants, compared to Asian millets – C4 plants, to investigate a key region of trans-Eurasian exchange, the Chinese province of Gansu. The isotopic results demonstrate that in Gansu province prior to 2000 cal. bc, the staples were millets. Between 20…
Why move starchy cereals? A review of the isotopic evidence for prehistoric millet consumption across Eurasia
The spread of agriculture is an important topic of archaeological research, but relatively few studies address the drivers behind the spread of specific species empirically. Here we use published isotopic data to consider whether the millets spread from their putative domestication centre in the East to western Eurasia for use as a staple food. We show that the consumption of significant quantities of millet was both far more sporadic than the ea…
Investigating Dietary Variation With Burial Ritual in I ron A ge H ampshire
The formal I ron A ge cemetery at S uddern F arm, located near D anebury hillfort, provides a unique opportunity to investigate whether differences in burial tradition and ritual behaviour seen at the two sites are linked to access to food resources during life. We measured the carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios of 40 humans from S uddern F arm and compared this information to previously published faunal data from the site and human isotopic dat…
One for the master and one for the dame
Changing cultures, changing cuisines
Food is well‐known to encode social and cultural values, for example different social groups use different consumption patterns to act as social boundaries. When societies and cultures change, whether through drift, through population replacement or other factors, diet may also alter despite unchanging resource availability within a region. This study investigates the extent to which dietary change coincides with cultural change, to understand th…
Palaeodiet at Eton College Rowing Course, Buckinghamshire
Stable isotope investigations of charred barley (Hordeum vulgare) and wheat (Triticum spelta) grains from Danebury Hillfort
Food globalization in prehistory
Plant sources of starch have been domesticated in several parts of the world. By the second millennium bc in various parts of Eurasia, such starchy crops are encountered, not only around their geographical regions of origin, but also at considerable distances from them. Drawing on evidence from across Eurasia, this paper explores this episode of food globalization in prehistory, comparable in the scale of its impact on global diets to the Columbi…
From necessity to choice
This article explores the context of the long-distance translocation of crops in prehistory. We draw upon contrasts in the isotopic signatures of Southwest Asian crops, including wheat and barley – C3 plants, compared to Asian millets – C4 plants, to investigate a key region of trans-Eurasian exchange, the Chinese province of Gansu. The isotopic results demonstrate that in Gansu province prior to 2000 cal. bc, the staples were millets. Between 20…
The extent of cereal cultivation among the Bronze Age to Turkic period societies of Kazakhstan determined using stable isotope analysis of bone collagen
Changing cultures, changing cuisines
Food is well‐known to encode social and cultural values, for example different social groups use different consumption patterns to act as social boundaries. When societies and cultures change, whether through drift, through population replacement or other factors, diet may also alter despite unchanging resource availability within a region. This study investigates the extent to which dietary change coincides with cultural change, to understand th…
Stable isotope investigations of charred barley (Hordeum vulgare) and wheat (Triticum spelta) grains from Danebury Hillfort
One for the master and one for the dame
Metals and millets
Exploring the Mesolithic and Neolithic transition in Croatia through isotopic investigations
The generalised picture of Mesolithic marine diet giving way to a Neolithic terrestrial diet, as derived from isotope measurements, has been both championed and challenged in this journal. Here new results from the Balkans offer a preliminary picture of a diversity of food strategy, both before and after the great transition
An Investigation Into Diet at the Site of Yarnton, Oxfordshire, Using Stable Carbon and Nitrogen Isotopes
This paper reports the results of stable isotopic analyses conducted upon animal and human bones recovered from Yarnton, Oxfordshire. Spanning the Neolithic to Saxon periods, it is in many ways a typical site, but is unusual in that a small Middle Iron Age cemetery was discovered. All of the data presented here lie within the expected isotopic ranges for the European Holocene, although both faunal and animal δ 15 N values are higher than is commo…
Diet, sex, and social status in the Late Avar period
Diet often plays a vital role in defining social divisions within and between social groups and thus can be used to understand the social paradigms of archeological cultures. During the Early Avar period (568-630 A.D.), burial evidence indicates that there were strong demarcations of social stratification and divisions between sexes and age groups; however, the symbols of intra-population heterogeneity become increasingly rare during the Late Ava…
Stable Isotope Investigations of the Danebury Hillfort Pit Burials
Carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses were performed on human and animal bones recovered from pits within Danebury Iron Age hillfort. All results are within the range expected for European Holocene specimens and are similar to those from other Iron Age sites in central southern Britain. Our results indicate that the human diet included a significant amount of animal protein (meat and/or dairy products) consumed on a regular basis, but do not precl…
Palaeodiet at Eton College Rowing Course, Buckinghamshire
Radical change and dietary conservatism
Recent research has demonstrated that a series of mountains from the eastern Iranian Plateau to eastern Kazakhstan and to western China played a significant role in trans-Eurasian exchange during the third and second millennia BC. In close association with these mountain corridors, a number of southwestern Asian cereals, notably free threshing wheat and barley, moved eastward, and broomcorn millet, among other plant foods originating in China, mo…
Diet and Lifestyle in the First Villages of the Middle Preceramic
We present stable isotope and osteological data from human remains at Paloma, Chilca I, La Yerba III, and Morro I that offer new evidence for diet, lifestyle, and habitual mobility in the first villages that proliferated along the arid Pacific coast of South America (ca. 6000 cal BP). The data not only reaffirm the dietary primacy of marine protein for this period but also show evidence at Paloma of direct access interactions between the coast an…
Stable Isotope Analysis of Human and Faunal Remains in the Western L oess P lateau, Approximately 2000 cal bc
During the second millennium bc , several significant changes were happening in prehistoric societies across E urasia. For instance, shifts in subsistence practice occurred in north‐western C hina, including the western L oess P lateau. However, the magnitude and nature of this dietary change are unclear and more detailed information and regional studies are needed in order to fully understand the reasons behind this change. In this study, palaeo…
The early colonial atlantic world
OBJECTIVES: The Canary Islands are considered one of the first places where Atlantic slave plantations with labourers of African origin were established, during the 15th century AD. In Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), a unique cemetery dated to the 15th and 17th centuries was discovered adjacent to an ancient sugar plantation with funerary practices that could be related to enslaved people. In this article, we investigate the origin and poss…
How ‘Pastoral’ is Pastoralism? Dietary Diversity in B ronze A ge C ommunities in the Central K azakhstan Steppes
Steppe communities have traditionally been viewed as pastoralist groups with similar herd‐based economies. Recent scholarship, however, warns against assumptions of homogeneity and new scientific techniques are providing a more nuanced approach to steppe archaeology, with increasing indications of diversity. This recent evidence further suggests that considering these communities as primarily pastoralist may hide a variety of subsistence strategi…
Heading for the hills? A multi-isotope study of sheep management in first-millennium BC Italy
Stable Isotope Analysis of Human and Animal Remains at the Qijiaping Site in Middle Gansu, China
Intercontinental exchanges between communities living in different parts of Eurasia during the late prehistoric period have become increasingly popular as a topic of archaeological research. The Qijia culture, found in northwest China, is one of the key archaeological cultures that can shed light on trans-Eurasian exchange because a variety of imports are found in this cultural context. These imports include new cereals and animals, which suggest…
Handle with care
This article examines the relationship between literary and bioarchaeological approaches to slavery, and investigates how the methods and priorities of each discipline might inform each other in understanding what it was like to be enslaved. Both bioarchaeologists and creative writers have attempted to access the inner lives of enslaved people, yet there has been little interaction between them. This paper offers an account of a research project …
Feeding the herds
Investigating Dietary Variation With Burial Ritual in I ron A ge H ampshire
The formal I ron A ge cemetery at S uddern F arm, located near D anebury hillfort, provides a unique opportunity to investigate whether differences in burial tradition and ritual behaviour seen at the two sites are linked to access to food resources during life. We measured the carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios of 40 humans from S uddern F arm and compared this information to previously published faunal data from the site and human isotopic dat…
Sea, sickness and cautionary tales
During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Spanish ships sailed around the globe connecting Spain to its colonies. While documentary records offer rich details concerning life on board ship, archaeological information is essential to generating a full picture of the past. The cemetery at Old St Bernard's Hospital, Gibraltar, provides an opportunity to study the skeletal remains of sailors. Following previous osteological research, carbon, nitr…
Archaeobotanical investigations at the earliest horse herder site of Botai in Kazakhstan
Water consumption in Iron Age, Roman, and Early Medieval Croatia
Patterns of water consumption by past human populations are rarely considered, yet drinking behavior is socially mediated and access to water sources is often socially controlled. Oxygen isotope analysis of archeological human remains is commonly used to identify migrants in the archeological record, but it can also be used to consider water itself, as this technique documents water consumption rather than migration directly. Here, we report an o…
An Investigation Into Diet at the Site of Yarnton, Oxfordshire, Using Stable Carbon and Nitrogen Isotopes
This paper reports the results of stable isotopic analyses conducted upon animal and human bones recovered from Yarnton, Oxfordshire. Spanning the Neolithic to Saxon periods, it is in many ways a typical site, but is unusual in that a small Middle Iron Age cemetery was discovered. All of the data presented here lie within the expected isotopic ranges for the European Holocene, although both faunal and animal δ 15 N values are higher than is commo…
Stable Isotope Investigations of the Danebury Hillfort Pit Burials
Carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses were performed on human and animal bones recovered from pits within Danebury Iron Age hillfort. All results are within the range expected for European Holocene specimens and are similar to those from other Iron Age sites in central southern Britain. Our results indicate that the human diet included a significant amount of animal protein (meat and/or dairy products) consumed on a regular basis, but do not precl…
Stable isotope investigations of charred barley (Hordeum vulgare) and wheat (Triticum spelta) grains from Danebury Hillfort
Food globalization in prehistory
Plant sources of starch have been domesticated in several parts of the world. By the second millennium bc in various parts of Eurasia, such starchy crops are encountered, not only around their geographical regions of origin, but also at considerable distances from them. Drawing on evidence from across Eurasia, this paper explores this episode of food globalization in prehistory, comparable in the scale of its impact on global diets to the Columbi…
Exploring the Mesolithic and Neolithic transition in Croatia through isotopic investigations
The generalised picture of Mesolithic marine diet giving way to a Neolithic terrestrial diet, as derived from isotope measurements, has been both championed and challenged in this journal. Here new results from the Balkans offer a preliminary picture of a diversity of food strategy, both before and after the great transition
Changing cultures, changing cuisines
Food is well‐known to encode social and cultural values, for example different social groups use different consumption patterns to act as social boundaries. When societies and cultures change, whether through drift, through population replacement or other factors, diet may also alter despite unchanging resource availability within a region. This study investigates the extent to which dietary change coincides with cultural change, to understand th…
Palaeodiet at Eton College Rowing Course, Buckinghamshire
Why move starchy cereals? A review of the isotopic evidence for prehistoric millet consumption across Eurasia
The spread of agriculture is an important topic of archaeological research, but relatively few studies address the drivers behind the spread of specific species empirically. Here we use published isotopic data to consider whether the millets spread from their putative domestication centre in the East to western Eurasia for use as a staple food. We show that the consumption of significant quantities of millet was both far more sporadic than the ea…
Investigating Dietary Variation With Burial Ritual in I ron A ge H ampshire
The formal I ron A ge cemetery at S uddern F arm, located near D anebury hillfort, provides a unique opportunity to investigate whether differences in burial tradition and ritual behaviour seen at the two sites are linked to access to food resources during life. We measured the carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios of 40 humans from S uddern F arm and compared this information to previously published faunal data from the site and human isotopic dat…
One for the master and one for the dame
Stable Isotope Analysis of Human and Faunal Remains in the Western L oess P lateau, Approximately 2000 cal bc
During the second millennium bc , several significant changes were happening in prehistoric societies across E urasia. For instance, shifts in subsistence practice occurred in north‐western C hina, including the western L oess P lateau. However, the magnitude and nature of this dietary change are unclear and more detailed information and regional studies are needed in order to fully understand the reasons behind this change. In this study, palaeo…
Water consumption in Iron Age, Roman, and Early Medieval Croatia
Patterns of water consumption by past human populations are rarely considered, yet drinking behavior is socially mediated and access to water sources is often socially controlled. Oxygen isotope analysis of archeological human remains is commonly used to identify migrants in the archeological record, but it can also be used to consider water itself, as this technique documents water consumption rather than migration directly. Here, we report an o…
From necessity to choice
This article explores the context of the long-distance translocation of crops in prehistory. We draw upon contrasts in the isotopic signatures of Southwest Asian crops, including wheat and barley – C3 plants, compared to Asian millets – C4 plants, to investigate a key region of trans-Eurasian exchange, the Chinese province of Gansu. The isotopic results demonstrate that in Gansu province prior to 2000 cal. bc, the staples were millets. Between 20…
The extent of cereal cultivation among the Bronze Age to Turkic period societies of Kazakhstan determined using stable isotope analysis of bone collagen
How ‘Pastoral’ is Pastoralism? Dietary Diversity in B ronze A ge C ommunities in the Central K azakhstan Steppes
Steppe communities have traditionally been viewed as pastoralist groups with similar herd‐based economies. Recent scholarship, however, warns against assumptions of homogeneity and new scientific techniques are providing a more nuanced approach to steppe archaeology, with increasing indications of diversity. This recent evidence further suggests that considering these communities as primarily pastoralist may hide a variety of subsistence strategi…
Metals and millets
Stable Isotope Analysis of Human and Animal Remains at the Qijiaping Site in Middle Gansu, China
Intercontinental exchanges between communities living in different parts of Eurasia during the late prehistoric period have become increasingly popular as a topic of archaeological research. The Qijia culture, found in northwest China, is one of the key archaeological cultures that can shed light on trans-Eurasian exchange because a variety of imports are found in this cultural context. These imports include new cereals and animals, which suggest…
On the Use of Biomineral Oxygen Isotope Data to Identify Human Migrants in the Archaeological Record
Oxygen isotope analysis of archaeological skeletal remains is an increasingly popular tool to study past human migrations. It is based on the assumption that human body chemistry preserves the δ18O of precipitation in such a way as to be a useful technique for identifying migrants and, potentially, their homelands. In this study, the first such global survey, we draw on published human tooth enamel and bone bioapatite data to explore the validity…
Novel isotopic approaches to investigating human palaeoecology
Stable isotope analyses started being performed on archaeological materials more than 50 years ago, to the best of our knowledge, when geochemists such as Cesare Emiliani applied oxygen isotope ana
Radical change and dietary conservatism
Recent research has demonstrated that a series of mountains from the eastern Iranian Plateau to eastern Kazakhstan and to western China played a significant role in trans-Eurasian exchange during the third and second millennia BC. In close association with these mountain corridors, a number of southwestern Asian cereals, notably free threshing wheat and barley, moved eastward, and broomcorn millet, among other plant foods originating in China, mo…
The early colonial atlantic world
OBJECTIVES: The Canary Islands are considered one of the first places where Atlantic slave plantations with labourers of African origin were established, during the 15th century AD. In Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), a unique cemetery dated to the 15th and 17th centuries was discovered adjacent to an ancient sugar plantation with funerary practices that could be related to enslaved people. In this article, we investigate the origin and poss…
Handle with care
This article examines the relationship between literary and bioarchaeological approaches to slavery, and investigates how the methods and priorities of each discipline might inform each other in understanding what it was like to be enslaved. Both bioarchaeologists and creative writers have attempted to access the inner lives of enslaved people, yet there has been little interaction between them. This paper offers an account of a research project …
Heading for the hills? A multi-isotope study of sheep management in first-millennium BC Italy
Archaeobotanical investigations at the earliest horse herder site of Botai in Kazakhstan
Diet, sex, and social status in the Late Avar period
Diet often plays a vital role in defining social divisions within and between social groups and thus can be used to understand the social paradigms of archeological cultures. During the Early Avar period (568-630 A.D.), burial evidence indicates that there were strong demarcations of social stratification and divisions between sexes and age groups; however, the symbols of intra-population heterogeneity become increasingly rare during the Late Ava…
Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (28 works) · Geography (27 works) · Archaeology (26 works) · Biology (20 works) · Ecology (18 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (17 works) · Isotope Analysis in Ecology (15 works) · Isotope analysis (13 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (10 works) · History (9 works)