@valefor it's a bit hard to explain, but I'm essentially doing isotopic analysis of cattle and pigs from a particular site to reconstruct their diets, and then comparing the results to other Iron Age sites to see if it can inform on what the role/nature of the features the animals were found in might be!

@yourimmortal thank you! I'm genuinely terrified about it, I've put everything I have into it these last few months! I'm doing incremental analysis of teeth looking at carbon and nitrogen, which can be used to reconstruct diet, and I'm looking to see if there's any potential movement or 'canopy grazing' in the dietary profiles. There's also a tiny amount of strontium analysis involved, to look at origin!

@yourimmortal I mean grazing on vegetation that grows under canopy, so living in or eating food grown in forested environments 😊

@yourimmortal I think that would depend on context preservation (and  security I. E. How likely is it that the context you're sampling includes material from, say, modern contexts) to be honest? I used IRMS and animal bone / teeth,  as I could then use the data to try and build animal management strategies (and I was severely limited on sample numbers and funds!) and compare the profiles for potential movement! The bone provides a lifetime average of the carbon and nitrogen values, and the incremental sampling of the tooth allowed me to build a life history over the formation of that tooth, so comparing the two can help identify significant changes, and thus potentially movement or change in husbandry practice (for example, from an open field to a forest)! I hope that makes sense, I've only just woken up 😂 X