Doctoral Dissertation Research: Faunal dental microwear texture for fine-scale reconstruction of hominin paleoenvironments

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Many significant hominin and archaeological sites represent complex, mosaic paleoenvironments that require high spatial resolution to be properly characterized. This study presents a new approach to fine-scale environmental reconstruction at these sites using tooth microwear in rodents, which have small home ranges and are found in abundance in different habitats. The project will collect data on rodent dental microwear, and will combine microwear analysis with ongoing and independent rodent ecological research. These analyses will result in a detailed association of microwear texture patterns with diet and environmental data that will help us better reconstruct paleohabitats using fossil rodent teeth. This award provides research support to a female graduate student from an EPSCoR state. It also provides research opportunities for undergraduates and fosters international collaboration between the University of Arkansas and the National Museum of South Africa.Research on rodent dental microwear textures has been limited because of a lack of information about habitat or diet for specific individuals in a study sample. This project will attempt to address this problem by associating incisor and molar microwear texture patterns with stomach contents of those same individuals, as well as their documented habitat floral composition and atmospheric dust load. The project focuses on three core questions: (1) Will individual differences in diet be reflected in differences in molar microwear textures? (2) What effect does habitat openness and associated dust level have on incisor microwear? and (3) Do incisor and molar microwear patterns reflect the floral composition and dust loads of rodent microhabitats? The co-PI will study rodents from an on-going environmental assessment project at the Kolomela Mine in the Central Free State of South Africa to answer these questions. She will obtain information on the dust levels and floral composition at each rodent capture site. Diet details will be derived through stomach content analysis of each specimen. These data will then be associated with standard quantitative descriptors that result from incisor and molar dental microwear texture analysis.