Was found on Little Orme, in 1891 during quarrying. In July 1996 she was examined by the Palaeoecological Research Unit, at Manchester University. They said she was a female who was thought to have died between the ages of 54 and 63 years of age. About the year 3,510 B.C. She was approximately 5feet tall and of a fairly robust build, she had degenarative arthritis of the cervical spine and right knee and other evidence suggested she had led a fairly robust life, more specifically she would have carried heavy loads on her head and heavy weights with her arms extended by her sides. Accompanying her remains were some bones from a young pig, aged under 36months at the time of it's death. The Bacup Natural History Society came into possession of Blodwen and a bronze spearhead in 1896, and 1893 respectively when they were donated to us.

Stable isotope results for the Little Orme skeleton 2010

Rick J Schulting

School of Archaeology

University of Oxford

The skeleton of an adult woman found in 1891 on the Little Orme was radiocarbon dated in 1997, and was found to be about 5500 years old, within what is known by archaeologists as the Neolithic period. This period is marked by the first appearance of farming in Britain, from around 6000 years ago. The domestic plants and animals came from western Europe, and were much the same as what we have today, with wheat and barley, and cattle, pigs, sheep and goats. Before this time, in what we call the Mesolithic, people in Britain lived by hunting wild animals, such as red deer and wild boar, and by gathering wild plant foods, such as hazelnuts. Near the sea, people would also have fished, perhaps using nets, and collected shellfish.

Archaeologists can look at the bones and seeds that are left from this time to tell what people ate. But another way to approach this question is to look at people’s skeletons. Stable isotopes of carbon (written as ‘d¹³C’, as opposed to those that decay over time, such as ¹⁴C, used for radiocarbon dating) and nitrogen (d¹⁵N) enter our bodies, including our bones, from the foods we eat during our lifetimes. We can measure these isotopes in the bones we find on archaeological sites, and from them learn something about the diets of these past people. Because bones take a long time to form, the isotopic information in them relates to the last 10 years or so of their lives. The advantage of this approach is that it can tell us what a specific person ate. On the other hand, it is only possible to learn some general things about a person’s diet using isotopes. But one difference that does show up very well is whether or not a person ate seafoods regularly. If you lived on the coast during the Mesolithic period, you would probably have eaten fish most days. The question is, then, whether people still used some seafoods in the Neolithic, when they had the option of farming, or whether they concentrated on their domestic crops and herds. The Lady of the Little Orme provides a good opportunity to answer this question, at least for this individual, since she was found very close to the sea, and presumably spent much of her life in the area.

To understand the stable isotope results for the Lady of the Little Orme, we first need to know what values we would expect for someone eating a lot of seafoods and what we would expect for a farmer eating only ‘land foods’. We know these values from other studies that have been done, so that we can say that a bone from a person who ate practically nothing but seafoods will have a d¹³C value of about -12‰ (parts per thousand compared to another value called a standard – but the details of this number are not important). The bone of a farmer, on the other hand, will have a value of about -21‰. A value half-way in between, about -16.5‰, would indicate that a person ate both seafoods and land foods in roughly equal amounts. The other isotope, d¹⁵N, tells us something slightly different. It refers to what ecologists call ‘trophic level’, which is simply how high something is in the foodchain. A plant has the lowest trophic level; the cow that eats the plant has a higher trophic level; and the wolf – or person! – that eats the cow has an even higher trophic level. In the ocean, foodchains can be much longer than they are on land, since smaller fish are eaten by bigger fish, which are then eaten by even bigger fish, and so on. So the two isotopes can work together to see whether seafoods contributed to people’s diets. They can also tell whether or not a person was a vegetarian. Again, we know from other studies roughly what d¹⁵N values to expect for plants (about 3-4‰), cows  and other animals (about 6‰) and most people (about 9-10‰ for land foods, or as high as 14-16‰ if eating mainly fish).