Neodymium isotopes in modern human dental enamel: an exploratory dataset

Abstract

Human provenance studies have been employing isotopic analyses to provide geographic location estimates in forensic and archaeological studies. As multi-isotopic approaches provide more specific location estimates than single isotopic analyses, new isotopic systems to evaluate human provenance would provide additional information. Neodymium isotope analysis, recently applied to human tissues, is a particularly promising method in coastal regions as the system is less influenced by the isotopic values of the ocean in comparison to other isotopic systems, such as sulphur or strontium. This collection presents the first data on neodymium isotopes from modern dental elements (third molars) of 47 individuals born and raised in the Netherlands, Caribbean, Columbia and Iceland. Neodymium isotope composition was successfully analysed for 40 individuals, with neodymium concentration data available for 23 individuals. For 37 individuals the dental elements have also been analysed for strontium isotopes. This dataset provides reference material for future neodymium isotope analyses. Once neodymium isotope analysis becomes more generally applicable due to technical developments, this data may eventually be used to generate maps displaying the spatial distribution of isotopic values, known as isoscapes. To ensure the interoperability and reusability of the data, the data is available on the IsoArcH ( https://isoarch.eu/) data repository. A discussion about the applicability of the analysis technique and the results can be found in “Evaluation of neodymium isotope analysis of human dental enamel as a provenance indicator using 10^13 Ω amplifiers (TIMS)”.

Keywords

• Neodymium isotopes
• strontium isotopes
• human
• provenance
• enamel