ArticleScience advances2021
High-resolution dietary reconstruction of victims of the 79 CE Vesuvius eruption at Herculaneum by compound-specific isotope analysis.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dietary inequality marker reveals 10,000 years of gender and cultural disparity in Europe.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Investigating human paleodiet at Mesolithic Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov, Karelia using a multi-proxy stable isotope approach.PloS one · 2026Article
- Baseline isotopic variability in plants and animals and implications for the reconstruction of human diet in 1 st century AD Pompeii.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Stable isotopic composition of Antarctic and Patagonian marine mammals collected before and during industrial-scale whaling: assessing the baseline for long-term changes in the marine ecosystem.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Investigating long-term trophic stability in North Atlantic cod (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- High-resolution isotope dietary analysis of Mesolithic and Neolithic humans from Franchthi Cave, Greece.PloS one · 2025Article
- High-resolution isotopic data link settlement complexification to infant diets within the Roman Empire.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Multi-proxy bioarchaeological analysis of skeletal remains shows genetic discontinuity in a Medieval Sicilian community.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Article
- Enhanced dietary reconstruction of Korean prehistoric populations by combining δ13C and δ15N amino acids of bone collagen.PloS one · 2024Article
- Parallel worlds and mixed economies: multi-proxy analysis reveals complex subsistence systems at the dawn of early farming in the northeast Baltic.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Regional long-term analysis of dietary isotopes in Neolithic southeastern Italy: new patterns and research directions.Scientific reports · 2023Review
- Stable isotope analyses of amino acids reveal the importance of aquatic resources to Mediterranean coastal hunter-gatherers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Reconstructing Hominin Diets with Stable Isotope Analysis of Amino Acids: New Perspectives and Future Directions.Bioscience · 2022Article
- Molecular signatures written in bone proteins of 79 AD victims from Herculaneum and Pompeii.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
20 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The remains of those who perished at Herculaneum in 79 CE offer a unique opportunity to examine lifeways across an ancient community who lived and died together. Historical sources often allude to differential access to foodstuffs across Roman society but provide no direct or quantitative information. By determining the stable isotope values of amino acids from bone collagen and deploying Bayesian models that incorporate knowledge of protein synthesis, we were able to reconstruct the diets of 17 adults from Herculaneum with unprecedented resolution. Significant differences in the proportions of marine and terrestrial foods consumed were observed between males and females, implying that access to food was differentiated according to gender. The approach also provided dietary data of sufficient precision for comparison with assessments of food supply to modern populations, opening up the possibility of benchmarking ancient diets against contemporary settings where the consequences for health are better understood.
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