Food Equality: Multiproxy Biomolecular Dietary Analysis Shows Unstratified Foodways Among Protohistoric E Baltic Communities

Biomolecular archaeology has significantly advanced our understanding of ancient foodways. However, the inevitable methodological biases of those novel methods might give deviating, even contradictory results. This paper highlights the major challenges of, but also potential solutions for, combining and comparing multiproxy dietary data. A rich dataset covering human skeletal remains, pottery, and zooarchaeological records from habitation and burial contexts from the Late Iron Age (650–1300 CE, LIA) Pada archaeological complex, NE Estonia, was subject to stable isotope, organic residue, and microfossil analysis, further complemented by local zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical records. All those dietary records were combined and compared through statistical modelling approaches to (a) exemplify the limitations and biases of different analytical approaches and (b) build a more cohesive and nuanced understanding of local foodways and their social variations. Our results show that LIA Eastern Baltic communities relied heavily on terrestrial, particularly plant based C3 diets with relatively low proportions of animal-based foods, although animal products were preferred in burial ritual context. Interestingly, no dietary variations were detected across different age and sex categories, proving equal access to main food sources for all community members in Pada. The latter contradicts with previously reported datasets from the same region and emphasises the utmost importance of multilevel dietary analysis not only in terms of dietary proxies, but also for different consumption contexts.