This is the website of the Stable Isotopes in Zooarchaeology Working Group of the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ).

The working group aims to bridge the gap between “traditional” osteoarchaeology and stable isotope analysis in archaeology, which can and should be used to investigate similar questions about the past, as well as improve their integration within research planning and design, methodology, and application. It will provide a valuable platform for communication amongst those who consider themselves zooarchaeologists, stable isotope analysts, or both. The group already has over 100 members and those who are interested can sign up for the mailing list by emailing zooarchisotopes@jiscmail.ac.uk

The formation of the group was spurred by the success of the one-day conference “Integrating Zooarchaeology and Stable Isotope Analyses“, held 21 June 2012 at the University of Cambridge. Many of the conference attendees are now working group members. If you are interested in becoming involved, please email Roz Gillis, ICAZ coordinator and liaison for the group.

The proceedings of the 2012 conference were published as a special issue, “Zooarchaeology and Stable Isotope Analyses” (S.E. Pilaar Birch and K. Kirsanow, ed.) in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences (Springer, June 2013). The working group is also actively engaged in compiling a bibliography of relevant literature, which is available on this site and regularly updated.

The first meeting of the Stable Isotopes in Zooarchaeology Working Group (SIZWG) took place 3-5 March 2016 at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, USA.

The University is home to the Center for Applied Isotope Studies and the Zooarchaeology Laboratory at the Georgia Museum of Natural History, which houses over 4,000 specimens in its comparative collection. Athens is a very walkable city about 70 miles east of Atlanta, GA, with plenty of accommodation and restaurants.

The full program and abstracts can be found here. Additional information on the meeting can be found here.

The most recent meeting of the working group “Beyond the baseline” took place in March 2023 in Berlin at the Museum Für Naturkunde and Freie Universität Berlin and also was accessible online.