DOI: 10.7291/d18q23
title: Isotopic evidence for long-distance connections of the AD thirteenth century Promontory caves occupants

description: The Promontory caves (Utah) and Franktown Cave (Colorado) contain
 high-fidelity records of short-term occupations by groups with material
 culture connections to the Subarctic/Northern Plains. This research uses
 Promontory and Franktown bison dung, hair, hide, and bone collagen to
 establish local baseline carbon isotopic variability and identify leather
 from a distant source. The ankle wrap of one Promontory Cave 1 moccasin
 had a δ13C value that indicates a substantial
 C4 component to the animal’s diet, unlike the C3 diets
 inferred from 171 other Promontory and northern Utah bison samples. We
 draw on a unique combination of multi-tissue isotopic analysis, carbon
 isoscapes, ancient DNA (species and sex identification), tissue turnover
 rates, archaeological contexts, and bison ecology to show that the
 high δ13C value was not likely a result of local plant
 consumption, bison mobility, or trade. Rather, the bison hide was likely
 acquired via long-distance travel to/from an area of abundant
 C4 grasses far to the south or east. Expansive landscape
 knowledge gained through long-distance associations would have allowed
 Promontory caves inhabitants to make well-informed decisions about
 directions and routes of movement for a territorial shift, which seems to
 have occurred in the late thirteenth century.
description: We analyzed the FS-305 moccasin ankle wrap specimen at the UCSC
 Paleogenomics ancient DNA laboratory (PGL) to (1) obtain a taxonomic
 identification, and (2) determine the sex of the animal. Working in the
 sterile laboratory facilities at the PGL, we washed the sample in
 ultra-pure water to remove soil from the exterior and then extracted DNA
 from 0.15g of tissue following the Dabney et al. (2013) tissue extraction
 protocol. We prepared two shotgun sequencing libraries following the Meyer
 and Kircher (2010) method. We labelled the libraries using dual indices
 with truseq sequencing adapters and, after transferring the PCRs to the
 modern DNA facility, amplified them with Kappa Hifi for 25 cycles. We
 pooled and sequenced the libraries across several Illumina Miseq 2x75bp
 runs. We used Seqprep2 and prinseq (v. 0.20.4) to remove adapters and
 merge reads, and aligned the resulting data to the nucleotide BLAST
 database using MEGAN (v. 6.18.0) to identify the taxonomic origin of the
 tissue. In addition and to confirm the species ID, we used BWA (v.
 0.7.12-r1039) to align each read to bison (Bison bison; NCBI
 GCA_000754665), cattle (Bos taurus; NCBI Btau_4.6.1), bighorn sheep (Ovis
 canadensis; NCBI CP011912.1), and two-toed sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni;
 NCBI5KN174222.1) genomes.
description: We have uploaded alignments (.bam files) of these shotgun data to
 bison (Bison bison; NCBI GCA_000754665), cattle (Bos taurus; NCBI
 Btau_4.6.1), bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis; NCBI CP011912.1), and
 two-toed sloth (Choloepus hoffmanni; NCBI5KN174222.1) genomes. We have not
 supplied raw shotgun data because there is a chance that ancient human DNA
 could be examined from these Moccasin samples and we do not have
 permission to study this DNA.