The very first archaeological application of stable isotope research was by South African archaeologist Nikolaas van der Merwe, who was excavating at the Iron Age site of Kgopolwe 3, one of several sites in the Transvaal Lowveld of South Africa, called Phalaborwa.
Van de Merwe found a human male skeleton in an ash heap that did not look like the other burials from the village. The skeleton was different, morphologically, from the other inhabitants of Phalaborwa, and he had been buried in a completely different manner than the typical villager. The man looked like a Khoisan; and Khoisans should not have been at Phalaborwa, who were ancestral Sotho tribesmen. Van der Merwe and his colleagues J. C. Vogel and Philip Rightmire decided to look at the chemical signature, and the initial results suggested that the man was a sorghum farmer from a Khoisan village who somehow had died at Kgopolwe 3.
The technique and results of the Phalaborwa study were discussed at a seminar at SUNY Binghamton where van der Merwe was teaching. At the time, SUNY was investigating Late Woodland burials, and together they decided it would be interesting to see if the addition of maize (a subtropical C4 domesticate) to the diet would be identifiable in people who formerly only had access to C3 plants; and so, oh best beloved, the process of stable isotope analysis was found to be useful.
Sources
Van der Merwe, Nikolaas. 1982. Carbon Isotopes, Photosynthesis, and Archaeology. American Scientist 70:596-606.
