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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Archaeol.
Sec. Archaeological Isotope Analysis
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fearc.2025.1520345
This article is part of the Research TopicIsotopic Research on Past Residential Mobility in the Aegean and its Immediate PeripheryView all 3 articles
Emerging Strontium Isoscapes of Anatolia (Türkiye): New Datasets and Perspectives in Bioavailable 87 Sr/ 86 Sr Baseline Studies
Provisionally accepted- 1Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
- 2Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Rochester, New York, United States
- 3University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States
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The use of strontium isotope ratio ( 87 Sr/ 86 Sr) analysis in ancient mobility studies in the archaeology of Anatolia (modern Türkiye) has steadily grown since the early 2010s. However, a coherent map of the isotopic variability of bioavailable Sr (isoscape) does not exist for the region and the paucity of baseline data that is necessary for the interpretation of archaeological data significantly constrains the heuristic power of this methodology in Anatolian archaeology. Baseline and 'local range' determination in previous studies have relied on geology maps or various sample types from very limited areas in site-centered mobility studies, and the use of predictive modeling for isoscape reconstruction at regional scales has just begun in Türkiye. In this study, we discuss current methodologies in Sr isoscape reconstruction including the open-access R-script and global database developed for modeling bioavailable 87 Sr/ 86 Sr isoscapes by Bataille and colleagues (2020), and we present a review of extant 87 Sr/ 86 Sr analyses and baseline studies in Anatolian archaeology. We combine all published baseline 87 Sr/ 86 Sr data from Türkiye with our unpublished 87 Sr/ 86 Sr data from proxy samples (plants and snail shells) from central Anatolia, and by incorporating this data (n=688) into the global database (where data from Türkiye is currently lacking), we create a modeled 87 Sr/ 86 Sr isoscape of Türkiye utilizing the R-script and we calculate the predicted standard error for this isoscape. This study demonstrates how additional empirical data serves to improve the Türkiye section of the global model using kriging and random forest regression techniques and it discusses how the uneven distribution of data impacts the resultant isoscape map. In closing, we comment on beneficial avenues for mobility studies in under-researched periods and regions in Anatolia.
Keywords: 87 Sr/ 86 Sr analysis, Bioavailable strontium isotopes, isoscapes, mobility, Random forest regression (RFR), Kriging, Anatolia, Turkey
Received: 31 Oct 2024; Accepted: 07 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yazıcıoğlu, Meiggs, Davis and Pilaar Birch. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
G. Bike Yazıcıoğlu, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
Suzanne Pilaar Birch, University of Georgia, Athens, 30602, Georgia, United States
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