ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces an addition to the suite of techniques traditionally employed to study medieval foodways, carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis of bone collagen, to a nonspecialist audience and reviews key case studies where isotope analysis was successfully used to investigate diachronic change and dietary variation between gender, age and social groups in the medieval periods. All techniques that use chemical analyses in order to reconstruct diet from the skeleton essentially rely on the same basic principle, commonly referred to as ‘You Are What You Eat’. The best established and most widely applied bone chemistry method for reconstructing diet from the skeleton is currently stable isotope analysis of bone collagen. Nitrogen stable isotope ratios track trophic level and therefore reveal some information about the relative contributions of plant and animal products to the diet; however, they cannot differentiate between the consumption of different herbivore species, different cuts of meat, or even between meat and dairy products.
