Paleonutrition
Sutton, MQ, KD Sobolik, & JK Gardner (2010) Paleonutrition. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 384 pp. ISBN 978-0-8165-2794-6
Description:
This multi-authored book focuses on paleonutrition – the study of prehistoric diets and their interpretation in terms of health and nutrition. The book is broken into six chapters. Following a historical introduction (chapter 1) to the topic, the second chapter describes the direct data used in studies of paleonutrition – e.g. data that directly reflect human health, such as the condition of human skeletal remains, paleofeces, and the like. The third chapter focuses on the indirect data, ranging from faunal and botanical remains, to biomolecular remains, to inorganic remains. Chapter four touches on a number of topics that can affect the recovery of paleonutritional data, such as taphonomy and field/laboratory methods. The fifth chapter is the briefest, and provides a sample of various frameworks that have been used to link human behaviour with nutrition/diet/subsistence. These include ecological perspectives that apply biological selection theory to the study of diets, gender studies that link (for example) differences in diet with sex, and so on. The final chapter provides five case studies. Three come from North America (Great Basin, the Southwest, and Coachella Valley, California) and two from Africa (east Africa, northern Sudan). Taken as a whole, this book is a solid, detailed overview of the field of paleonutrition, and as such will probably be of most benefit to advanced graduate students interested in entering the field.
