Abstract
I am particularly pleased to write this short piece for two reasons. First, the editors were both my graduate students at UCSD, and I feel privileged as their former advisor to be invited to contribute to this volume. Second the history of stable isotope analyses within anthropology began, arguably, in Chicago, the city of my birth. Much of the original research was done at the University of Chicago, where my father, James A Gavan, was a graduate student following his army service in WWII. The next phase of the work took place after WWII first in Chicago and subsequently in California with the placement of many University of Chicago physicists, chemists, and geochemists to the California Institute for Technology (Cal. Tech.), to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA, where I did my postdoctoral work), and at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) from which I recently retired after 20 years in the Anthropology Department. My passion for the approach and its applications was meant to be.
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Schoeninger, M.J. (2023). Stable Isotope Analyses and Human Behavior: A Science Driven by Ideas and Tools. In: Beasley, M.M., Somerville, A.D. (eds) Exploring Human Behavior Through Isotope Analysis. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32268-6_1
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