Dear colleagues,
May I ask if any of you ever used fly puparia or human lice as radiocarbon dating material?
I am working on material from Alaskan hunter-gatherer sod houses and I thought that human lice and fly puparia may be the best possible dating material for occupation contexts as they are unlikely to pre-date the formation of the floor layers in which they are preserved (contra to beetle fossils and plant material that may have been transported with peat or other collected resources).
Possible problems I can think of include the use of paraffin to retrieve these remains and the fact that fly maggots may have been pupating in sea mammal oil or butchery refuse (marine reservoir effect).
Any advice or thoughts on past experiments would be most welcome!
Cheers and all the best,
Vero
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