Collaborative Research:

CAR-UTSA and the Laboratory for Stable Isotope Geochemistry (LSG)-UTSA

In 2006, a team of researchers from CAR, led by Assistant Director Raymond Mauldin, began collaborating with the Dr. Debajyoti Paul, director of the Laboratory of Stable Isotope Geochemistry (http://www.utsa.edu/Isotopelab/paul.html).  The LSG includes a state of the art ThermoFinnigan DeltaPlus XP Stable Isotope Ratio Mass-Spectrometry (IRMS) facility that can obtain high precision measures of several elements, including 18O, d13C, and d15N, from a variety of biological and geological materials. In collaboration with the LSG, CAR has developed methods to isolate bone collagen for d13C and d15N, and is exploring the applications of isotopic measurements of 18O and d13C extracted from snail shell. A recent initiative is focused on using collagen in small, generalist herbivores to reconstruct aspects of paleoenvironments. This research is undertaken by Cynthia Munoz and Raymond Mauldin (CAR), Olivia Short, Kevin Daiber, and Lynn Wack (CAR/Anthropology), Patrick Villanueva (CAR/Geology) and Robert Hard (UTSA-Anthropology).

Initial Results

Presentations:

Kemp, Leonard, Cynthia Munoz, Debajyoti Paul, Grzegorz Skrzypek, Robert Hard, and Raymond Mauldin

2008 APPROPRIATE SCALES AND BUNNY TALES: USING SMALL HERBIVORES FROM ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES IN ECOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION. Paper presented at the 111th  Texas Academy of Science annual meeting, Corpus Christi, Texas (March )

Munoz, Cynthia, Leonard Kemp, Raymond Mauldin, and Robert Hard

2008 IS THERE GOLD IN THEM THAR HARES? USING SMALL HERBIVORES FROM ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES IN PALEO-ECOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION. Paper presented at the 79th Annual meeting of the Texas Archeological Society, Lubbock, Texas (October)