Collagen fingerprinting of archaeological bone and teeth remains from Domuztepe, South Eastern Turkey
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Collagen fingerprinting of archaeological bone and teeth remains from Domuztepe, South Eastern Turkey Mike Buckley & Sarah Whitcher Kansa
Received: 7 December 2010 / Accepted: 21 March 2011 / Published online: 7 May 2011 # Springer-Verlag 2011
Abstract We applied a recently developed method of collagen peptide mass fingerprinting for taxonomic identification in faunal remains to 111 specimens from the Neolithic site of Domuztepe in southeastern Turkey. Advances on the published technique allow us to move beyond the key domesticated fauna (sheep, goat, pig and cattle) to include non-domesticates (deer and gazelle, as well as humans). As the animal economy of Domuztepe was dominated by domestic sheep and goats, a large number of the samples tested were morphologically indistinguishable sheep/goat remains. A number of samples represented elements that provide information on age (i.e., mandibles) or sex (pelvis); thus, this represents the first major study to attempt to improve kill-off profiles using
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12520-011-0066-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. M. Buckley (*) Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre, Faculty of Life Sciences, 131 Princess Street, Manchester M1 7DN, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Buckley BioArCh, Department of Biology, Archaeology and Chemistry, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5YW, UK S. W. Kansa The Alexandria Archive Institute, 125 El Verano Way, San Francisco, CA 94127, USA
collagen fingerprinting. We also show that the collagen extracted from dentine is equally amenable to the proposed methodology as bone collagen. Keywords Collagen fingerprinting . MALDI . Archaeological proteomics . ZooMS
Introduction The domestication and exploitation of animals represents one of the critical stages in the changing human articulation with the living world (Barker et al. 1988). Sheep and goat were two of the first animals domesticated in the Near East and, by the 8th millennium BC, became the primary animals exploited by Neolithic people in this region (Peters et al. 2005). However, as sheep and goat bones are notoriously difficult to distinguish, particularly with young individuals or fragmented assemblages, zooarchaeologists frequently aggregate them into a single ‘sheep/goat’ category. While aggregation increases sample size and provides a general impression of the age and sex composition of the combined sheep/goat population, it is much more desirable to separate the sheep from the goats in order to reveal differential exploitation patterns that can be reflected in the harvest profiles of sheep and goats separately. Though their bones are difficult to distinguish, domestic sheep (Ovis aries) and goats (Capra hircus) are dissimilar in many ways: they have different feeding patterns and requirements with regards to husbandry practices, they tolerate different environmental conditions and they provide a variety of products. The ability to distinguish the
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