Isotopic comparison of hair and bone: Archaeological analyses

This paper presents a comparison of the isotopic values of 23 pairings of hair keratin and bone collagen taken from archaeological humans excavated in the U.K. with the aim of examining whether modern human isotopic data can be directly compared with archaeological isotopic data. The mean differences between bone collagen and hair keratin isotopic values are in the range of 0-1‰ in δ13C and 0-2‰ in δ15N, but with a high degree of variability, making it impossible to quantify the isotopic relationship between collagen and keratin. However, a lack of information about the individuals analysed suggests that such a comparison may not be the ideal method of comparing the two tissues.