Establishing collagen quality criteria for sulphur isotope analysis of archaeological bone collagen
By Olaf Nehlich, M. Richards. 2009
273 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Sulphur isotope measurements of bone collagen from archaeological sites are beginning to be applied more often, yet there are no clear criteria to assess the quality of the collagen and therefore the validity of the sulphur isotope values. We provide elemental data from different methods (DNA sequences, amino acid sequences and mass spectrometric measurements) which are used to establish a reliable system of quality criteria for sulphur isotope analyses of bone collagen. The difference in the amount of sulphur from fish and mammalian collagen type I led to the suggestion to use different criteria to assess the in vivo character of the collagen between these two categories. For establishing quality ranges, the bone collagen of 140 modern animals were analysed. The amount of sulphur in fish and mammalian bone collagen is 0.63 ± 0.08% and 0.28 ± 0.07%, respectively. Based on these results we define for mammalian bone collagen an atomic C:S ratio of 600 ± 300 and an atomic N:S ratio of 200 ± 100, and for fish bone an atomic C:S ratio of 175 ± 50 and an atomic N:S ratio of 60 ± 20. These quality criteria were then applied to 305 specimens from different archaeological contexts.
Subfields: Archeology, Ecology, Paleontology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/613682bd48ffc8c8d2184f7d3e3f174f15bab61c
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Citations in the corpus
- Fish bone chemistry and ultrastructure: implications for taphonomy and stable isotope analysis (2011, background): “One notable exception is the work of Nehlich and Richards (2009), who suggested that because of differences in the amino acid composition of collagen, the quality criteria for sulfur isotopic analysis (C:S ratio) should be different for fish and mammalian bone.”
- Comparison of two methods of extracting bone collagen for stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis: comparing whole bone demineralization with gelatinization and ultrafiltration (2014, background): “More stringent protocols are also important for analysis of sulfur isotope ratios (Nehlich and Richards, 2009).”
- Evolution of habitat and environment of red deer (Cervus elaphus) during the Late-glacial and early Holocene in eastern France (French Jura and the western Alps) using multi-isotope analysis (δ13C, δ15N, δ18O, δ34S) of archaeological remains (2011, background): “range of 300e900 and 100e300, respectively (Nehlich and Richards, 2009) were retained.”