Yu Itahashi

Affiliation: University of Tsukuba
Job Class: Visiting Fellow
Specialty: Stable Isotope Ecology, Scientific studies on cultural properties

Research Topic

My study aims to reveal social development from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, when human society became more complex and urbanized after the appearance of food production, through isotope analyses of archaeological bones. My main research fields are West Asia and China, where agriculture and urban civilizations emerged. Using isotope analyses of human and animal bones, my research tries to reveal the societies based on human diets, animal management, etc.

Nitrogen and carbon in bone collagen and amino acids of animals are composed of several isotopes with different mass numbers. Since collagen and amino acids are formed from food resources, it is possible to estimate what kinds and in what the isotope analyses consumed composition of foods. Additionally, information available from bone isotope analyses is an individual's diet.

In the Early Neolithic period in West Asia, there was a custom of burying bodies under the floors of houses, making it possible to link human remains to the houses they were possibly living in. We found that isotopic compositions of hunter-gatherers (Hasankeyf Höyük) and early farmers (Asıklı Höyük) varied within the community but had close values in each house buried in. This result suggests that hunter-gatherers and the early farmer did not share the food resources equally throughout the community but instead managed food on a household basis.

Similarly, I believe that isotopic compositions of animal bones reveal how livestock was managed and by what size social unit. Given the evidence related to these economic units, I try to elucidate the process of complexity and growth in scale of the prehistoric societies.