Reconstructing Individual and Population Diet at Fishergate House: Application of a New Microsampling Method for Stable Isotope Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The stable isotope signature of childhood diet changes from a fetal signal (similar to the mother), to a breastfeeding signal, and finally to a weaned signal, which may or many not match the adult diet. The patterning of these changes can give insight into child feeding practices and parenting. A stable isotope microsampling method was created to allow the analysis of these diets in a single individual. Tooth dentine was used as once formed it does not remodel, as does human bone. The method was developed and tested on a modern sample of 33 teeth collected from Edmonton, Alberta. The results showed changing early childhood diet with some individuals being breastfed, while others were bottle fed. Despite the large variety of weaning foods available to modern families, the weaned child diet was surprisingly uniform and did not reflect the variation seen in Canadian adults. Dentine analysis using the new microsampling technique, as well as rib stable isotope analysis, was used to reconstruct juvenile diet from the Fishergate House (14th – 16th century) York, UK. 62 juvenile samples and 11 adult female samples were collected. No previous dietary reconstructions of the children from this site have been run, so it was important to establish the time of weaning for the population during this critical period of early childhood that often results in infant death. The high level of mortality for four to six year olds at Fishergate House led previous researchers to believe weaning was taking place at this time. In contrast, the results of this work showed that weaning was complete by two years. By looking at individuals, it is possible to see variation in weaning practice that reflects the individual choices of mothers and children at Fishergate House. The dietary information for Fishergate House was also compared with growth and pathological data from the site to look more closely at health. The results of this study show that by looking at weaning at a population and individual level it is possible to look at the overall early childhood feeding pattern as well as at deviation from that pattern
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".