Lead isotope analysis of intra‐skeletal variation in a 19th century mental asylum cemetery: diagenesis versus migration

Living bone sequesters environmental lead (Pb) from both inhalation and ingestion, providing a record of Pb exposure over a lifetime. Questions about the effects of diagenesis and how to remove them have hampered most isotopic and elemental determinations. As a result, researchers often restrict their analyses to tooth enamel, despite its limitations. We report Pb isotopes in teeth and bones in a frontier population of 15 individuals from a late 19th century mental hospital graveyard in Pueblo, Colorado, a town active at that time in the smelting of ores. Analysis of lead isotopes sequestered in healing bone from rib fractures gives an isotopic fingerprint from the last few months of individual's lives. When bone tissues or teeth from different stages of life are analysed, life history trajectories such as migration routes can be developed which are partially self‐correcting for diagenesis. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Messages from the field

This editorial poses the question of how the development of 'pervasive' communication technologies are impacting on the way in which fieldwork might now be conducted? It explores pessimistic and optmistic responses both of which illuminate the way that the production of contemporary anthropological knowledge undergoing significant change.     

Short notices

Bonnafous, A., Plassard, F., and Vulin, B., eds., Circuler Demain (DATAR/Éditions de l'Aube, 1993), 191pp., 95R, ISBN 2 87678 126 3

Dioudonnat, P.‐M., Les 700 rédacteurs de ‘Je suis partout’ 1930–1944 (Sedopolis, 1993), 107pp., 240F., ISBN 2 904177 16 7

Furet, F., Revolutionary France 1770–1880 (Blackwell, 1992), 630pp., £40.00, ISBN 0 631 17029 4

Hainsworth, P., ed., The Extreme Right in Europe and the USA (Pinter, 1992), 320pp., £45.00, ISBN 0 86187 790 X

Macchia, G., L'Ange de la nuit. Sur Proust, trans, from the Italian by Marie‐France Merger, Paul Bédarida and Mario Fusco (Gallimard, 1993), 269pp., 130F., ISBN 2 07 072885 4

McPhee, P., A Social History of France 1780–1880 (Routledge, 1993), 347pp., £12.99 pbk, ISBN 0 415 01616 9

Prost, A., ’Les Anciens Combattants’ and French Society 1914–1939 (Berg, 1992), 152pp., £29.95, ISBN 0 85496 672 2 (hbk), £9.95, ISBN 0 85496 337 5 (pbk)

Service d'Information et de Diffusion du Premier Ministre, La politique de la France, aoÛt 1991‐juillet 1992 (La Documentation française, 1993), 165pp., 70F., ISBN 2 11 002915 3

Teich, M., and Porter, R., eds., The National Question in Europe in Historical Context (CUP, 1993), 343pp., £40.00, ISBN 0 521 36441 8 (hbk), £13.95, ISBN 0 521 36713 1 (pbk)     

Site formation processes in caves: The Holocene sediments of the Haua Fteah,Cyrenaica, Libya

Caves have yielded some of the most globally important archaeological sequences, but often their interpretation has suffered from assumptions about cave sedimentary processes. Caves contain distinctive sedimentary environments: this has major implications for the understanding of contained archaeological materials. This paper describes and analyses the Holocene sediments in the Haua Fteah, a sequence regarded as essentially continuous by the original excavator. 50 years after it was first excavated, the Haua's Epipalaeolithic to post-Classical chronological range and rich finds make it still the key Holocene archaeological site in North Africa. The reassessment shows, however, that the sequence is strongly discontinuous and this has major implications for the reinterpretation of the site, as the highly-resolved archaeological record is thus likely to reflect a series of brief occupations, rather than continuous human activity. As with many caves, the sedimentary record in the Haua Fteah is an extremely sensitive indicator of environments and processes in the wider landscape. Secure understanding of sedimentary process, from analysis of the highly individual records found in caves, is essential for full understanding of their contained archaeology.