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The First New Zealanders? An Alternative Interpretation of Stable Isotope Data from Wairau Bar, New Zealand

Brown, A; (2015) The First New Zealanders? An Alternative Interpretation of Stable Isotope Data from Wairau Bar, New Zealand. PLoS One , 10 (10) , Article e0135214. 10.1371/journal.pone.0135214. Green open access

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Abstract

PLOS ONE Volume 8 includes an article “The First New Zealanders: Patterns of Diet and Mobility Revealed through Isotope Analysis”. The paper proposes that burial groups within the settlement phase site of Wairau Bar differ in terms of dietary stable isotopes and 87Sr/86Sr. The authors argue this difference is probably due to one group being a founding population while the other burials are later. Here we review the work of Kinaston et al. and present an alternative analysis and interpretation of the isotopic data. Treating the isotope data independently from cultural and biological factors we find that sex best explains dietary variation. Our reassessment of 87Sr/86Sr confirms the authors original finding of high mobility of early New Zealanders but suggests a larger range of individuals should be considered ‘non-local’ on current evidence.

Type: Article
Title: The First New Zealanders? An Alternative Interpretation of Stable Isotope Data from Wairau Bar, New Zealand
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0135214
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0135214
Language: English
Additional information: © 2015 Brown, Thomas. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
UCL classification: UCL
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1472638
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