Seasonal stability and variation in diet as reflected in human mummy tissues from the Kharga Oasis and the Nile Valley

Stable carbon isotopes of the hair and skin of six Roman–Byzantine Period (400–700 AD) individuals from the Kharga Oasis, Egypt, were analysed in order to reconstruct degrees of dietary variability or stability in an oasis ecology. These results are compared to previously studied contemporaneous individuals who lived at sites from the Nilotic ecology near Wadi Halfa, in the Northern Sudan. Residues extracted from the Kharga material appear to belong to C3 plants (such as trees) and probably are resins used in an artificial mummification process. Lengths of hair representing up to a one-year period of growth indicate that the oasis environment was unaffected by seasonality, compared with the seasonal shifting of C3 plants (wheat, barley, fruits, vegetables) and C4 plants (millet, sorghum) at sites located along the Nile. The Kharga population consumed significantly greater quantities of C3 plants and does not appear to have produced C4 plants locally, or imported them in trade with Northern Sudanese populations. There are also no dietary differences between either males and females, or adults and children, which suggests that status was not biologically defined.